After getting my xenified FreeNAS up and running I noticed an oddity with disk reporting. When I pulled up the reports tab I noticed ada0 never showed any activity, despite my knowing that disk is doing plenty.

The mystery became greater when I noticed these error messages in my logs:

g_dev_taste: make_dev_p() failed (gp->name=ada0, error=17)

After some research I discovered here that disks passed through to a VM via Xen’s PCI Passthrough function present themselves to FreeBSD in a peculiar manner. In particular, the first disk in the passthrough array presents itself as ada0, despite the boot disk also having the name of ada0. With two disks named ada0 it’s a tossup on which one shows up in reporting, not to mention the strange errors above.

The fix is to add BSD parameter to not start disk numbering at ada0. For FreeNAS, you do this via the tunables section (System / Tunables / Add Tunable.) Add the following tunable:

variable: hint.ada.0.at
Value: scbus100
Comment: ada0 PCI passthrough fix
Enabled: true

Once that is configured, reboot FreeNAS. You will now have proper reporting of all your passthrough disks and the strange dev_taste errors will be gone.