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

[Kevin Day]

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.

The pause is between 1 and 60 minutes (somewhat variable, and i'm not sure on what). After it eventually boots, everything seems fine. Doing a diff between the 2218(-) and 2352(+) servers' verbose boots, I see:

-ACPI timer: 0/90 0/23 1/1 1/1 1/1 1/1 0/12 1/1 1/1 1/1 -> 7
+ACPI timer: 0/162 0/1546 0/1119 0/150 0/165 0/778 0/123 0/203 0/83 0/93 -> 0

This looks more interesting. If I'm reading acpi_timer_test() correctly, the ACPI timer isn't particularly good on the 2218, but is flat out unusable on the 2352. I don't know if this is a symptom or the actual cause of the problem, though.

Disabling ACPI results in an instant boot up, but the SCSI PCI device isn't found which makes it kinda pointless.

Before I delve too deeply into this, does this ring any bells to anyone?