u/daemonpenguin

What: The Silly Cessna Club will be visiting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. This structure is a great opportunity for flying planes under it, looping around it, and landing on the multi-lane bridge.

When: August 16, 2026 at 17:00 UTC.

Where: We will be taking off from the aircraft carrier off the coast of San Francisco. We will fly east to the bridge and buzz it, land on it, fly under it, and then head back to the aircraft carrier around 18:00 UTC.

Who: The Silly Cessna Club and anyone who would like to join us. Small aircraft, such as Cessnas, PC-7s, and Beechcraft Barons are recommended, but not required.

Why: For fun and screenshots!

How: We will be flying in Geo-FS: https://www.geo-fs.com Coordination and communication in flight will be handled through Discord: https://discord.gg/Zhzk68ueZ

You can start from the aircraft carrier by selecting it from the Geo-FS Location tab. Select the "On Runway" category and pick "USS john C Stennis (Carrier)" as the location.

Last night the location where I host one of my Vultr servers pushed out a KVM update on the host. Since then my server has been locked in a reboot cycle.

The guest runs FreeBSD (installed from the Vultr FreeBSD install image).

The system shows the boot menu, then fails to launch, restarts the guest, shows the boot menu, then restarts again.

I've found that a FreeBSD rescue ISO will not boot on this instance. But a Linux (Finnix) rescue ISO will boot and, using it, I can confirm the root filesystem of the FreeBSD instance is intact, no signs of corruption.

I've opened a ticket with Vultr, but so far no response.

I'm attempting to restore a recent snapshot of the instance to another location to see if this fixes the issue. (Updates to follow.)

My main concern is this is just one of multiple instances I run with Vultr for business. If the other KVM updates go the same way (breaking compatibility with FreeBSD), it's going to get expensive in a hurry and we'll need to quickly migrate clients to another VPS provider.

Anyone else have VPS instances with Vultr at Amsterdam? Anyone else having boot problems this morning? According to the Vultr status page, there have been multiple reports through the night, but the Amsterdam location is showing working. (Which it is, sort of, the VPS is technically running, just not booting from its storage.)

Update: I tried restoring a known to be good snapshot of the VPS to another location. It failed to boot there, reporting loader_lau could not be found. This is turning into a bigger problem than it first seemed. Is Vultr unable to boot FreeBSD instances anymore?

Second update: While I have not heard back from Vultr, it looks like the issue is related to this: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=233098

I think the new KVM settings break booting FreeBSD, possibly due to a change in EFI mode or disk driver. Have filed a ticket with Vultr and am waiting to hear back.

Third update: It looks like any locations which have the new KVM update cannot boot my snapshot of FreeBSD. I'm attempting to restore the snapshot to a location which does not yet have the KVM update to see if this fixes the issue. If it does not, then I think the only remaining solution is to migrate to another VPS host. Which is going to be a lot more work than I'd like, but I'm running out of options and, despite the instance being down for nearly 10 hours, I have not heard back from Vultr.

Fourth (and probably penultimate) update: I heard back from Vultr and they confirmed the issue was with the new KVM version and its settings which were not compatible with recent releases of FreeBSD. They have fixed the settings for my VPS and it's running.

I've got other VPS instances at other locations which have not gone through the KVM update yet. I've asked Vultr Support to make sure the updated KVM settings are available at the other locations when the updates happen so the servers don't get knocked off-line. I will update with their response and the results in the coming hours/days. The test will be when the next KVM update rolls out on Wednesday morning. Hopefully the fix will be in place by then.