How to access CLI when SDDM fails to start?

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A black, unresponsive screen tends to be one of the trickiest problems when upgrading our operating system. In the previous release of NomadBSD 132R, without desktop environment, with OpenBox only, it was convenient:

  1. Ctrl-Alt-F1 — fish, dmesg /var/run/dmesg.boot;
  2. Ctrl-Alt-F2 — syslog /var/log/messages;
  3. Ctrl-Alt-F3 — tty terminal for root;
  4. Ctrl-Alt-F4 — back to X11 visual windows GUI (F9).

How to leave the display manager (SDDM) or otherwise gain a prompt command-line interface (terminal access) when XFCE fails to load?

freebsd-update refuses to run after reboot in a single-user mode, saying it is denied write access.

So today I postponed FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE, reverted to 14.2Rp3 via ZFS boot environment (bectl).

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