When booting an i386 system in a virtual machine under qemu
(pkgsrc/emulators/qemu), the second stage boot loader's timeout expires
much too quickly.  If I set the timeout to 6000 seconds (via installboot
-o timeout=6000), then I observe it counting down at about 100 counts
per second, instead of 1 count per second.

sys/arch/i386/stand/boot/boot2.c:boot2() prints "Press return
to boot now, any other key for boot menu", and then calls
awaitkey(boot_params.bp_timeout, 1).  I have verified that
boot_params.bp_timeout is correct.

sys/arch/i386/stand/lib/pcio.c:awaitkey() calls delay() to delay for
1/POLL_FREQ seconds, and POLL_FREQ = 10, so it calls delay(100000).

I think that the boot code is linked with the version of delay() from
sys/arch/i386/stand/lib/biosdelay.S, not the "#define delay(x)
(*delay_func)(x)" from sys/arch/i386/include/cpu.h.  

sys/arch/i386/stand/lib/biosdelay.S:delay() uses BIOS call "INT 15H
Function 86H".

As far as I can tell, qemu attempts to provide the INT 15H
function 86H BIOS call. qemu uses a BIOS from bochs, and
pkgsrc/emulators/bochs/work/bochs-2.1.1/bios/rombios.c 3356 contains an
implementation of the relevant function.  The BIOS in qemu seems to be
based on a more recent version of bochs (qemu-0.7.0 seems to contain a
BIOS built from rombios.c revision 1.130, according to strings; while
bochs-2.1.1 has rombios.c revision 1.103.2.2).

So, what's wrong, and how can it be fixed?

--apb (Alan Barrett)