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Date:      Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:34:36 -0500
From:      Alex Goncharov <alex-goncharov@comcast.net>
To:        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   8 to 9: A longer wait early in the boot of a (damaged) Compaq Presario
Message-ID:  <E1Ry5E4-000HRq-ED@hans3>

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About three years ago, my Compaq Presario F700 notebook got "damaged
in BIOS": it carried Windows Vista then, and that OS could not be
recovered from the system image disks I had created for a brand-new
machine.  The damage was somewhere around BIOS/firmware area -- the
way the console looked on a bootup looked differently (simpler) now
that after several reboots trying to recover Vista, it got fried.

Some googling told me then that the irreversible loss of Windows was
not unusual for these Compaq machines -- the damaged systems didn't
give one a chance to use the recovery disks.

OK, I made the system dual bootable to Debian Linux and FreeBSD 8
then; with that, it booted all right, but in both cases the 'nfe0'
interface Ethernet address was being set to 0.  No big deal: I used an
Ethernet address from my older laptop destined to be destroyed and
gave it to 'nfe0' when setting the network interface properties at the
system initialization.  Works great, both in Debian and FreeBSD.

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).

About a week ago, I made a jump and upgraded the system's FreeBSD from
version 8 to 9.  Everything is great (I am typing this message on that
machine now) but the boot pause after the (looking new in 9) boot menu
is *much* longer now -- it will show the '\' character and wait for,
subjectively, half a minute before putting anything else on the
screen.

This is not of any practical importance for me, I feel very good about
what I got in FreeBSD 9 but I am puzzled and earn for the knowledge.

Can anybody educate me on:

  * What might have happened with this notebook three years ago, when
    some layer over BIOS "burned out"?  What are these layers?  Where
    are the interface Ethernet addresses set up?

    Interesting, it was only this interface that lost its
    factory-assigned address:

----------------------------------------
nfe0@pci0:0:10:0:       class=0x020000 card=0x30ea103c chip=0x054c10derev=0xa2 hdr=0x00
vendor     = 'nVidia Corporation'
device     = 'MCP67 Ethernet'
----------------------------------------

   but not this one:

----------------------------------------
ath0@pci0:3:0:0:        class=0x020000 card=0x137a103c chip=0x001c168crev=0x01 hdr=0x00
vendor     = 'Atheros Communications Inc.'
device     = 'AR242x / AR542x Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express)'
----------------------------------------

   * What is the boot process doing, hanging out there after passing
     the boot menu stage?

   * Why does it hang there longer in FreeBSD 9, compared to 8? (And
     why doesn't it hang there at all in Debian?)

   * Is there any loader.conf variable or some such that would tell
     the system to safely skip things leading to this pause?

Thanks,

-- Alex -- alex-goncharov@comcast.net --



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