FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 on Dell OptiPlex GX260

None of the below is relevant as of 2014-06-06, other than the possible need of reverting sys/dev/pci/pci.c. I have confirmed that FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 r267147 works as expected on Dell OptiPlex GX260.

If you happen to run FreeBSD/i386 stable/8 on older Dell desktop PCs, like an OptiPlex GX260, you might want to back out r262226 prior to upgrading to the latest revision. The change done to sys/dev/pci/pci.c in r262226 renders the kernel unable to mount the root filesystem.

You’re in the clear if you run 8.4-RELEASE, or stable/9, or stable/10 for this particular hardware. Maybe it’s time to move on to stable/10 or stable/9.

Luckily, none of my PowerEdge servers running stable/8 are affected.

Here’s what you should do (once) prior to running make buildworld buildkernel on affected systems:

cd /usr/src
svn up
svn diff -r 262226:262225 sys/dev/pci/pci.c | patch

The above action will add the character M to your kernel’s global revision number, indicating one or more local changes.

Should sys/dev/pci/pci.c be corrected for this deficiency in the future, you might want to revert the changes made above by running:

cd /usr/src
svn revert sys/dev/pci/pci.c
svn up