8 to 9: A longer wait early in the boot of a (damaged) Compaq Presario

[Uffe Jakobsen]

On 2012-02-16 19:21, Alex Goncharov wrote:
> ,--- I/Alex (Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:34:36 -0500) ----*
> | There was one other odd thing that I noticed then: while Debian booted
> | without a delay, FreeBSD 8 made a long pause after passing the boot
> | menu: it would display the '/' character and sit there for some
> | non-trivial amount of seconds.  I assumed that it was doing some BIOS
> | querying, and with BIOS (firmware?) being damaged, it took the system
> | some time to figure things out... perhaps it was re-querying BIOS,
> | seeing the insane value of 0 for an interface's Ethernet address (I
> | have many machines running FreeBSD, including multiple laptops, and
> | this machine is unique in the long bootup pause).
> `-------------------------------------------------*
> ,--- Rares Aioanei (Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:08:14 +0200) ----*
> | I get the same on my HP Pavilion dv9750 laptop, but with an intact BIOS,
> | afaict. And that happens regardless of the wi-fi card's state (eg
> | disabled or enabled from the hardware button). Maybe this helps.
> `--------------------------------------------------------*
>
> To add to the fact base: I don't have any of this with my HP Pavilion
> DV6-1334US: neither with FreeBSD 8 nor 9 (upgraded that laptop two
> days ago, too.)
>

FreeBSD 8.x has a memory test that takes place quite early during kernel 
startup - I have seen a system with 128Gb ram hang for 1-2 minuttes on 
this account - quite annoying delay if you ask me. There were 
discussions about removing this memtest feature in FreeBSD 9 but I do 
not know if it made it into the tree in time... but you'll need to have 
lots of memory for this to kickin - not very likely with your laptop.

Another similar boot delay/hang seen with FreeBSD 8.x with certain SATA 
controllers. I have a FreeBSD 8.x system that hangs exactly 75 seconds 
(timeout?) during (every) kernel startup when running SATA in AHCI mode 
(setup within the BIOS) - if switched back to SATA IDE (compatible) mode 
the system kernel starts instantly with out the 75 sec (timeout) hang.
This problem seems resolved by the SATA/AHCI driver overhaul that 
FreeBSD 9 got.

Both problems are visually identical (as far as I remember) - an 
unexplainable delay during kernel startup - it sleeps/hangs before 
anything is printed on screen...

HTH

/Uffe