Hi, I was just testing upgrades prior to the 5.6 release and noticed items in the rc.conf.local were being ignored. A bit of digging, I noticed, rc.subr had some changes and more importantly there were quite a few changes to rc.conf.
Cutting to the chase, replacing rc.conf from the upgraded 5.5 machine with the 5.6_BASE fixed the issue and items were being picked up in the rc.conf.local again. Just thought I would point it out as rc.conf isn't replaced when using the upgrade feature in the 5.6 release. Cheers, Jason.