[Soekris] BIOS timer off by an order of magnitude?

[Dan McMahill]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 10:39:54AM -0700, Ted Lemon wrote:
> I've been hacking on the NetBSD PXE boot loader, and one thing that 
> jumped out at me right away is that it doesn't wait before starting - 
> it just launches straight into the boot process.   When I went to debug 
> this, I discovered that the boot loader _is_ actually trying to wait 
> for five seconds for the user to press a key, but the wait only 
> actually lasts for a half second.
> 
> I looked at the code, and I don't see a mistake in it - it counts a 
> second as a million ticks, which is consistent with the documented 
> behavior of the INT 15H timer function - that each tick is one 
> millisecond.   So I think there must be a problem in the BIOS where 
> it's ticking every tenth of a millisecond instead of every millisecond. 
>   This is on a Net4521, by the way, with the 1.26a BIOS.
> 
> Any clues would be much appreciated.
 
Hi Ted!

I see the same thing on the net4501, don't have the bios rev handy.
Are you by any chance working on the problem with the pxe boot
loader in NetBSD-current?

-Dan


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