Extremely slow boot on VMWare with Opteron 2352 (acpi?)

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday 09 March 2010 3:40:26 pm Kevin Day wrote:
> 
> I'm troubleshooting a pretty weird problem with running FreeBSD 8.0 (amd64) 
inside VMware ESX/ESXi servers. We've got a wide range of physical servers 
running identical copies of VMware and identical FreeBSD virtual machines. 
Everything works fine on all of our servers for Windows and Linux VMs, but 
FreeBSD running on Opteron 2352 physical servers takes an average of about 20 
minutes to boot. Normally I would chalk this up to being a VMware bug, but the 
situation that's actually occurring is somewhat interesting.
> 
> If I boot up on an Opteron 2218 system, it boots normally. If I boot the 
exact same VM moved to a 2352, I get:
> 
> acpi0: <INTEL 440BX> on motherboard
> PCIe: Memory Mapped configuration base @ 0xe0000000
>    (very long pause)
> ioapic0: routing intpin 9 (ISA IRQ 9) to lapic 0 vector 48
> acpi0: [MPSAFE]
> acpi0: [ITHREAD]
> 
> then booting normally.

It's probably worth adding some printfs to narrow down where the pause is 
happening.  This looks to be all during the acpi_attach() routine, so maybe 
you can start there.

-- 
John Baldwin