long timeout on boot

[Jack Vogel]

Both on my own machine, and on systems in our test group's lab, we
notice these long (like 2min maybe?) delays near the end of boot. It
seems to be ATA/SATA related. It has just announced the one disk
it discovered, then shows the CPUs launched, and then it just sits
printing nothing for, like I said, maybe a minute or two. Finally it will
complete boot and all seems to be fine.

I am guessing its in a detection loop maybe? Any ideas?? Oh,
this is 6.1 RELEASE on i386, although I'm pretty sure x86_64
will show the same behavior.

Jack