pfSense » pfSense Plus

David Burns wrote:

Currently preparing for an upgrade of SG-1100 remote worker fleet.

However after installing the latest SG-1100 recovery image (pfSense-plus-compat-recovery-23.09.1-RELEASE-aarch64.img.gz) it appears that the resulting image restore to SG-1100 eMMC is not aligned:
(reference https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/solutions/sg-1100/reinstall-pfsense.html)

[...]

This is a UFS build. Clearly the FreeBSD slice (starting sector 540673) is not aligned with 4k / 32k / 1M boundary. Non aligned writes may have an impact on eMMC life (depends on write workload of course).

Within the slice the actual UFS partition is at least 8k aligned (although suboptimal given that the UFS2 default block size is 32kB):

[...]

Compare this to a Netgate 7100 (with ZFS):

[...]

Hopefully image build can be corrected using appropriate gpart add -t freebsd -a 1M ... /dev/mmcsd0 argument parameters.

Lastly is the SG-1100 (aarch64) recovery image also used for SG-2100? If so this issue may also impact SG-2100.

I suspect this is likely due to the boot partition changes as outlined here: https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/13967

Quick update - it appears that the new pfSense+ 24.03 installer for SG-1100 (bundled in recovery image netgate-installer-aarch64-img.gz obtained via Netgate store) now correctly aligns the UFS/ZFS partition:

gpart show mmcsd0
=>      40  15273520  mmcsd0  GPT  (7.3G)
        40    532480       1  efi  (260M)
    532520      8152          - free -  (4.0M)
    540672    131072       2  ms-basic-data  (64M)
    671744  14598144       3  freebsd-ufs  (7.0G)
  15269888      3672          - free -  (1.8M)

Clearly the UFS partition start sector 671744 is 4k / 32k / 1MB aligned. (ZFS partition table is similar)

Lastly it is noted that there does not appear to be any reference to this issue in the release notes (eg Installer section)? Presumably this fix would also apply to SG-2100?

Thanks