long timeout on boot

[Jim Pingle]

Antony Mawer wrote:
> 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

I posted about this problem previously, when I had (very incorrectly)
thought it had something to do with the RAID controller.

I have a large number of servers that exhibit this behavior and have done so
since 6.0-RELEASE. I have 5.4 on one of them but I don't recall if it did
the same thing or not.

The servers I have which do this tend to be Intel chipset systems, most of
them are VA Linux boxes: Dual pIII-800s on L440GX+ Boards, if memory serves.

fdc0: <floppy drive controller> port 0x3f2-0x3f5 irq 6 drq 2 on acpi0
fdc0: [FAST]
fd0: <1440-KB 3.5" drive> on fdc0 drive 0

I have one or two of these setup I could do some testing with, but I'm not
sure what dates to start with, seeing as the problem has existed since
6.0-RELEASE on these (and with most of them that's the first release I've
used on them.)

I can check some more on Monday to see at least if the 5.x box is doing
this. It's a testing server that's not currently in use. I'd check right now
but it'd be almost impossible to diagnose remotely (no serial console.)