faster booting

[Martin McCormick]

	I second the statement about BIOS checks taking a long
time. After working with many FreeBSD boxes, mostly Dells and a
few IBM servers, they can take forever (2 to 3 minutes) which
seems like forever when one is trying to get back on line quickly.
	If one is using a serial console, the \|/-\|/- of the
kernel loading doesn't start until most of that time is gone. I
am guessing the actual FreeBSD kernel bootup is maybe 30 seconds
or so. If you have a SCSI bus, be sure the settling time built
in to the boot process is as short as will still work correctly.
Earlier versions of FreeBSD waited 15 seconds default. I safely
got it down to 1.5 seconds and might have even gotten it shorter
if I really knew how long it took the bus to settle.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group