Re: 9.1: boot-time delay? [WORKAROUND FOUND]

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I suppose it's not possible to configure ahcisata in the BIOS on the
> long-delay machines?

Thank you very much!  Yes.  That is possible - and it fixes the delay.
I would not have thought to look for that; I would not have expected
piixide and ahcisata to be similar enough that a BIOS setting could
personality-swap between them.

> I'm guessing this is some quirk of the pciide(4) and piixide(4)
> drivers.

Sounds like; they presumably have a bug somewhere in some delay
calculation.  But at least I have something approaching a workaround.

> Not to be too flip, but do you expect these machines to reboot
> frequently in production?

Often enough that my colleague on the customer-interface side of things
thinks twenty seconds of delay on reboot is a problem.

> If not, then I'd probably live with the delay on reboot as at this
> point, [...]

Me too.  I didn't even realize it was there until they pointed it out
to me; I don't really notice twenty seconds more delay when the typical
peecee BIOS imposes anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes before
it even starts to boot.  I'm obviously not part of their target market
for this thing.

> I'd be concerned that any fix I came up with for it would have
> implications down the road which might be more serious and more
> impactful on operations.

Fair concern.

> I certainly understand the need to know what's going on, but if a
> machine only reboots once or twice a year in production, then ...

Also fair.  But I think once a day is the very fewest reboots we're
likely to see for this, though I'm not really all that in touch with
the user base, so....

I'll push this over to them and see if it's an acceptable workaround to
poke the BIOS settings on the existing installed base.

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