SUMMARY: V445 boot

My original question is included below.

Unfortunately, I have not found the answer to our V445's
~ 4 minute boot pause.  I should have noted that the system
PROM revisions are up-to-date (4.22.33 for both POST and
OBP).

Suggestions included:

  - ensuring that the system is doing minimal
    diagnostics: I had already set diag-trigger to
    "none", but I also tried various combinations of
    diag-passes=0, diag-level=min and diag-switch?=false
    to no effect.
    
  - connecting a tty to the system to observe its boot
    process: I did this, but I didn't seen any output
    that wasn't visible from the server's graphic
    console
    
  - checking for unused NICs: the system has 4 NICs, only
    one of which is hooked up to a switch. The actual delay
    seems to occur before the OS gets anywhere near configuring
    the NICs, but I set up dummy configs on them anyway just
    to see. Unfortunately, this didn't help.
    
  - check for incomplete fibre channel loops: the system has
    only the 8 internal SAS drives

Thanks to:

  Mike Salehi
  John Martinez
  Ric Anderson
  Musa Williams
  Brad Morrison
  William D. Hathaway
  John Hallman
  Don Ratliff
  Hicheal Morton
  Darcy, Matthew
  Sudhir
  Kamal Bhusal
  
for your quick responses.

Sean

>
>We have a new V445 server running Solaris 10 6/2006 which we've
>had to reboot a number of times to debug an application issue.
>
>Can anyone tell me why this machine pauses for about 4 minutes
>before the OS even appears to start loading? A typical boot
>sequence looks like:
>
>[OPENBOOT BANNER]
>Rebooting with command: boot
>
>~ 20 second pause
>
>Boot device: /<...path...> File and args:
>
>~ 4 minute pause
>
>after 4 minutes the little propeller spins for a few seconds,
>then we see:
>SunOS Release 5.10....
>
>and the machine boots up to the dtlogin prompt in under a minute.
>
>As advertised, Solaris 10 boots up very quickly, it's just that
>the delay prior to booting seems interminable.
>
>Can anyone tell me what the machine is doing during this 4 minute
>period of seeming inactivity? I've tried a "boot -v", and even
>putting "set moddebug=0x80000000" in /etc/system to instrument
>the boot sequence, but both of these cause extra output only
>after the "SunOS Release 5.10" line.
>
>I'm guessing that this delay is due to some kind of Openboot
>probing of devices, but 4 minutes seems excessive for a machine
>with 2 CPUs and only 8 internal SAS disks attached.
>
>Is there anyway I can shorten this delay temporarily until we
>get the machine into production?
>
>Thanks for any assistance you can provide.
>
=================================================================
Sean Walmsley        sean at fpp . nuclearsafetysolutions dot com
Nuclear Safety Solutions Ltd.  416-592-4608 (V)  416-592-5528 (F)
700 University Ave M/S H04 J19, Toronto, Ontario, M5G 1X6, CANADA
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