Can't interact with UI with network cable plugged in

[patmaddox]

I'm trying to get started with 0.7 on a 2013 iMac. Something seems to not like my NIC (which uses bge driver according to ifconfig).

Can't interact with UI when booting with network cable plugged in (doesn't finish booting?)

If I boot from USB with the network cable plugged in, it seems to not finish booting. I see the desktop, and an icon called Starvolume, but I don't see Live or EFI (which is what I see when I boot without a cable. The mouse and keyboard are non-responsive.

Attaching network cable after booting makes UI non-interactive

If I boot from USB without the cable plugged in, I get a responsive UI and can open applications. I've opened the Terminal and looked at ifconfig. After I plug the network cable in, I can still use the Terminal and see that the NIC has been configured via DHCP.

Next I try to launch an application - Create Live Media so I can install helloSystem onto the internal hard drive. At this point I'm unable to interact with the UI at all. I can move the mouse cursor around, but not click anything, and the keyboard is unresponsive. I can no longer interact with Terminal either.

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I don't have a clue how to debug this since I can't interact with anything after plugging in the network cable. Any ideas?

[patmaddox]

I've made some progress... I tried GhostBSD, and experienced the same behavior: running dhclient on the interface after plugging the cable in would make the UI unresponsive (other than the mouse, which I can still move).

I did some research and found that by adding echo dev.bge.0.msi=0 >> /boot/loader.conf I could run dhclient without freezing the UI.

This is where GhostBSD and helloSystem diverge. With GhostBSD, I can run dhclient and get on the network. With helloSystem, I can plug in the network cable without it freezing immediately - but then running either ifconfig or dhclient causes the interface to freeze (other than moving the mouse, still).

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Edit: I don't have any such problems with using vanilla FreeBSD with XFCE.

[probonopd]

Thank you very much @patmaddox.

It appears that without the workaround, the dhclient process does not complete, preventing from the boot process from completing.

Possibly this is related to
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=229727.

[probonopd]

I can reproduce the issue, have opened
helloSystem/ISO#355

[probonopd]

Unfortunately, I could not find a solution that works on the Macmini4,1 yet. Any help appreciated.