Slow load time to /boot/loader (3rd stage loader)

[J. Kuczewski]

Hi all,

I have recently installed 9.0-RC1 on my Thinkpad X201 and have noticed 
severe (~20 mins) latency to get to the third stage bootloader 
(/boot/loader). This is system triple booted with Windows 7 and Arch 
Linux using the GRUB 2 bootmanager. FreeBSD is not on a extended 
partition, if it matters. I have tested two BIOS disk configurations, 
one with AHCI and the other with IDE compatibility mode. IDE mode is 
comparatively faster, but still slower than expected (~3 mins). To see 
if this was a regression, I installed 8.2, and it has the same exact 
effect. Booting off of USB stick loads fine (e.g. the installer). The 
following is my notes with the different BIOS configurations with a link 
to the verbose dmesgs for each...

With AHCI enabled:
     o  dmesg output: 
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/45307545/dmesg_logs/dmesg_ahci.log
     o  Timeline:
         ~05 mins - Loading /boot/default/loader.conf appears.
         ~16 mins - /boot/kernel/kernel <args> displayed.
         ~20 mins - Welcome to FreeBSD boot prompt.

With IDE compatibility enabled:
     o  dmesg output: 
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/45307545/dmesg_logs/dmesg_ide.log
     o  Timeline:
         ~02 mins - Loading /boot/default/loader.conf and 
/boot/kernel/kernel <args> is displayed at once.
         ~03 mins - Welcome to FreeBSD boot prompt is displayed.

After the boot prompt, startup is normal with no slowdowns to the login 
prompt.

---
Current BIOS and ECP versions (output from Linux):
---
# dmidecode -s bios-version
6QET52WW (1.22)
# dmidecode -t 11
# dmidecode 2.11
SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x0027, DMI type 11, 5 bytes
OEM Strings
         String 1: IBM ThinkPad Embedded Controller -[6QHT30WW-1.11    ]-

---
FreeBSD GRUB2 entry:
---
menuentry "FreeBSD 9.0-RC1" {
     insmod ufs2
     set root=(hd0,3)
     chainloader +1
}

Any guidance to determine the slow down of this loading problem would be 
great.

Thank you for your time...

Cheers,
     -John Kuczewski