A big-ish machine, cannot boot

Jung-uk Kim jkim at FreeBSD.org
Fri Nov 19 18:21:09 UTC 2010


On Friday 19 November 2010 12:04 pm, Garrett Cooper wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 8:59 AM, Andriy Gapon <avg at freebsd.org> 
wrote:
> > on 19/11/2010 18:57 Ivan Voras said the following:
> >> On 19 November 2010 17:13, Gary Jennejohn 
<gljennjohn at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >>> On Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:51:22 +0200
> >>>
> >>> Andriy Gapon <avg at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >>>> on 19/11/2010 17:41 Ivan Voras said the following:
> >>>>> Fujitsu TX300
> >>>>
> >>>> [Thunderbird 3 sometimes fails quoting while replying - blame
> >>>> it]
> >>>>
> >>>> Perhaps I am wrong, but isn't the "twirly" shown by the
> >>>> loader, still? Not sure if the kernel does that.
> >>>
> >>> Yup, that's the boot loader.  The kernel spits out printfs.
> >>
> >> Good news, of sorts - I left while I went for dinner and
> >> apparently it did boot in the meantime. So it's not a complete
> >> hang, it just takes unexpectedly long (10+ minutes?)
> >>
> >> I'm currently running "make -j24 buildworld" and once it boots
> >> it looks very fast!
> >
> > You ought to determine a cause of the long boot, though.
> > No compromises or excuses! :-)
>
> A similar issue occurred with an HP box recently (in the last 3-4
> months?). I'd check the archives for more details.

I bet these are "legacy free" machines, right?  I recently noticed 
that recent Intel chipsets cause incredibly long delays when 
non-existent ISA ports are accessed, most notably AT keyboard ports.  
(My gut tells me it is going in and out of SMM repeatedly for 
nothing.)  Back in the old days, when we had real ISA bus, it used to 
delay very short and fixed amount time.  Those days, this behaviour 
was even (ab)used as a delay function where a real timer is not 
available yet. ;-)

Try getting rid of all unnecessary device drivers from your kernel 
configuration.

Jung-uk Kim


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