Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2006 21:08:21 -0400 From: Jim Pingle <lists@pingle.org> To: Antony Mawer <fbsd-stable@mawer.org> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Jack Vogel <jfvogel@gmail.com> Subject: Re: long timeout on boot Message-ID: <4480E105.1040106@pingle.org> In-Reply-To: <4480DC6B.10306@mawer.org> References: <2a41acea0606011530wf7bca5du23711fbfbfbc81@mail.gmail.com> <1149241101.60897.58.camel@buffy.york.ac.uk> <2a41acea0606020943j1843d949kf8d25e3164255e43@mail.gmail.com> <4480DC6B.10306@mawer.org>
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Antony Mawer wrote: > On 3/06/2006 2:43 AM, Jack Vogel wrote: >> On 6/2/06, Gavin Atkinson <gavin.atkinson@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.)
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