Have you tried profiling the FreeBSD boot (https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/percival-profiling_the_freebsd_kernel_boot/ https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bs

Have you tried profiling the FreeBSD boot (https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/percival-profiling_the_freebsd_kernel_boot/ https://papers.freebsd.org/2018/bsdcan/percival-profiling_th...) to see where the time is going? I made some significant speedups a couple years ago, but I'm sure there's still room for further improvements, especially if you have hardware which I didn't test with.