Skylake Loader Performance 10.3-BETA3

[Will Green]

Hello,

I’ve been testing a new Skylake E3 Xeon server with 10.3-BETA3. The slow loader issue described on the forums https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/53511/ is still present. On my Supermicro X11SSH-LN4F motherboard with E3-1260L v5 it takes over ten minutes to get to kernel boot. After that performance seems normal (though I’m still testing). This issue occurs when booting the installer from a USB stick or when booting the installed OS over SATA. 

I understand using UEFI resolves this issue, although I only have one Skylake motherboard model on which to confirm this. I know this issue is unlikely to be fixed for 10.3 release, but I think it should be noted in the release and/or hardware notes. Skylake systems are going to be increasing numerous this year, especially now Skylake Xeons are starting to ship in volume. 

I am happy to test patches and/or current on this server if that helps. If you want more details on the motherboard/system I have started a post on it at http://buildwithbsd.org/hw/skylake_xeon_server.html

TIA
Will