pfSense

I'm not sure if this is relevant to the pfsense code itself, but caught me this afternoon so will pass along for reference.

pfSense fails to mount the boot drive under the following conditions;
- pfSense is virtualized under KVM/QEMU (Proxmox)
- Processor type is set to 'HOST', as observed on an AMD Threadripper (1950X)
- pfSense version is 2.5.x (current development branch)

This occurs with either UFS & ZFS filesystems. I updated from 2.4.x (dev) to 2.5 (dev 2019-04-28) via the web interface & the system did not come back up. No errors were indicated in the boot, however at the point of mounting the root partition, pfSense pegged two threads to 100% and stalls indefinitely. No disk I/O, or change in RAM use, occurs. FSCK similarly freezes on an unclean partition after reading the journal, and will thus not complete or mark the partition clean.

I was able to access the partition without issue using 2.4.4 installation media, so was able to copy off the config.xml file. I proceeded to install 2.5 fresh from the 2019-04-28 snapshot ISO (ZFS); however, it also would not mount the root partition after installation.

In the KVM setup, changes to ACPI, SCSI controller emulation, or drive options had no effect. I was originally passing through CPU=HOST for the processor. Changing that to KVM64 allowed pfSense 2.5 to boot to completion. I've since set it to 'SANDYBRIDGE' (i.e., post-Westermere) in order to expose AES-NI functions and pfSense continues to work without issue.