long timeout on boot

[Antony Mawer]

On 3/06/2006 2:43 AM, Jack Vogel wrote:
> On 6/2/06, Gavin Atkinson <gavin.atkinson at ury.york.ac.uk> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 15:30 -0700, Jack Vogel wrote:
>> > Both on my own machine, and on systems in our test group's lab, we
>> > notice these long (like 2min maybe?) delays near the end of boot. It
>> > seems to be ATA/SATA related. It has just announced the one disk
>> > it discovered, then shows the CPUs launched, and then it just sits
>> > printing nothing for, like I said, maybe a minute or two. Finally it 
>> will
>> > complete boot and all seems to be fine.
>>
>> Can you put a verbose dmesg up with debug.fdc.debugflags=255 set from
>> the loader?
>>
>> I suspect you'll find it's floppy-related.  Try setting
>> hint.fdc.0.disabled="1" from the loader and seeing if it goes away.
> 
> YUP, I hadnt looked before, but during the whole timeout the floppy
> access light is on. There were some messages during boot from the
> controller as well.

I've seen this on a number of 6.0 production systems with exactly the 
same symptoms. Disabling the floppy controller removes the long delay.

I've skimmed the change log for the fdc driver:

     http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/fdc/

... but there have been a huge number of commits over the recent few 
years. Any number of those sounds like potential candidates for 
introducing the problem, but it will need someone with a large degree of 
patience to try and identify where the problem started occurring.

I might add that it seems very hardware dependent: unfortunately none of 
my test machines on-hand exhibit the problem or I might be able to do 
some testing myself...

-Antony