From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Dec 18 03:10:47 1996
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Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 22:00:55 +1100
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199612181100.WAA31169@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: abial@korin.warman.org.pl, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: 2.2-ALPHA hangs while calibrating clocks...
Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
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>I'm trying to install FreeBSD 2.2-ALPHA on my machine. Here is
>configuration:
>
>* MB SOYO Intel Triton HX, Pentium 120MHz, BIOS Award
>* 64MB RAM EDO, pipeline burst cache 512k
>* HDD IDE WDC32100 (2.1 GB) LBA mode 4, floppy drive etc...
>* 3c509 ISA ethernet adapter (ep0)
>
>The kernel is, of course, GENERIC 2.2-ALPHA.
>
>So, the installation itself goes well (although I used 2.1.6 install
>floppy), and then, after rebooting with newly installed system, it hangs
>almost forever (at least for 15 minutes :-) ) saying:
>
>Calibrating clock(s) relative to mc146818A clock...
>
>and then says it failed.
>
>So my question is: do I have a broken motherboard? Are there any options
>in kernel config that I should change in order to avoid this looong
>waiting? 

The RTC seems to be broken after the reboot.  The calibration routine
just waits for the seconds counter to change twice.  It apparently didn't
change for 15 minutes.  There is a generous timeout of 100 million reads
of the seconds counter to give it a chance to change.  Change it to 1
million (in clock.c).

Bruce