On Wed, 05 Sep 2007, Andreas Gustafsson wrote:
> That's easier said than done, because when running under HVM, the
> countdown after the "Press return to boot now, any other key for boot
> menu" message goes by in the blink of an eye.  Maybe qemu optimizes
> away a delay loop or something?

Qemu's implementation of one of the timer chips is wrong
(or at least, was wrong a couple of years ago).  See
<http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-i386/2005/08/06/0003.html>.

If you set the timeout to be much larger (at least thousands of seconds,
possibly tens of thousands of seconds), then it should count down slowly
enough for you to press a key.

--apb (Alan Barrett)