# Slow Boot Loader



## elimite (Sep 7, 2010)

My boot process is unuseably slow. It takes 10 - 12 minutes before I get the boot loader menu, and another 1 or 2 until the kernel startup messages. Once the OS comes up, it appears to perform normally.

I've seen a few threads reporting similar problems and tried various suggested fixes. Here's the rundown.


I'm using a toshiba L455 with 2 GB memory and 250 GB disk.
I'm dual booting, with Arch linux using partitions (slices in BSD-speak) 1, 2, 5, 6, 7. BSD in on partition 3. I'm using the Arch Grub to start the FreeBSD loader. Nominal bios setting has SATA mode set to AHCI.
Changing the SATA mode in the bios to "compatibility" from "ahci" greatly increases bootup speed. The entire process takes under 2 minutes. Unfortunately, once 'up' the os suffers from an interrupt storm (irq 16 on ehci) that consumes 80% of the CPU.
Changing the (few) other bios settings available doesn't help.
Running the loader in verbose mode doesn't provide more insight into what's going on.
Changing the loader.conf file to manually load ahci also doesn't help.
On the off chance the problem involves dual booting with Linux, I've tried running PC BSD in live mode from the CD. Presumably, the entire boot up shouldn't touch the disk at all. Once again, I get the same behavior.
Finally, I've confirmed the same behavior with V8.1, 8.0, and 7.2.

I'm stuck. Any ideas? 

A copy of my dmesg after the system has booted is included below:

http://pastie.org/1144028


----------

