pfSense 2.4.4 as guest on top of Xen 4.13: boot performance debugging

[pietrushnic]

Hi all,
I'm using pfSense as a guest on top of Xen 4.13 and facing the quite long boot time. I would like to understand what is going on. Hardware is PC Engines apu2 with recent firmware. Xen config:

name = "pfsense"
type = "hvm"
vcpus = 2
memory = 2048
pae = 1
acpi = 1
apic = 1
viridian = 1
rtc_timeoffset = 0
localtime = 1
on_poweroff = "destroy"
on_reboot = "destroy"
on_crash = "destroy"
sdl = 0
vif = [
  'bridge=xenbr0,backend=ndvm-1',
  'bridge=xenbr0,backend=ndvm-2',
#  'bridge=xenbr0,backend=ndvm-3'
 ]
serial = "pty"
vga="none"
nographics = 1

## Use this for installation ##
#disk = [ '/mnt/pfSense-CE-memstick-serial-2.4.4-RELEASE-p3-amd64.img,,hda,rw',
#       '/mnt/disk.img,,hdb,rw'
#]

## Use this for running from disk when already installed ##
disk = [ '/usr/share/xen-images/pfsense.img,,hdb,rw' ]

What I see on serial output is this:

00:00:06 /boot/config: -S115200 -D
00:00:10 Consoles: internal video/keyboard  serial port
00:00:10 BIOS drive C: is disk0
00:00:10 BIOS 639kB/2096124kB available memory
00:00:10
00:00:10 FreeBSD/x86 bootstrap loader, Revision 1.1
00:00:10 (Wed Nov 21 08:03:01 EST 2018 root@buildbot2.nyi.netgate.com)
00:00:24 Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf
00:00:24 Finish /boot/defaults/loader.conf
00:00:29 Loading /boot/loader.conf.local
00:00:29 Finish /boot/loader.conf.local
00:02:43 /
          __
   _ __  / _|___  ___ _ __  ___  ___
  | '_ \| |_/ __|/ _ \ '_ \/ __|/ _ \
  | |_) |  _\__ \  __/ | | \__ \  __/
  | .__/|_| |___/\___|_| |_|___/\___|
  |_|
 
 
 +============Welcome to pfSense===========+   __________________________
 |                                         |  /                       ___\
 |  1. Boot Multi User [Enter]             | |                      /`
 |  2. Boot [S]ingle User                  | |                     /    :-|
 |  3. [Esc]ape to loader prompt           | |      _________  ___/    /_ |
 |  4. Reboot                              | |    /` ____   / /__    ___/ |
 |                                         | |   /  /   /  /    /   /     |
 |  Options:                               | |  /  /___/  /    /   /      |
 |  5. [K]ernel: kernel (1 of 2)           | | /   ______/    /   /       |
 |  6. Configure Boot [O]ptions...         | |/   /          /   /        |
 |                                         |     /          /___/         |
 |                                         |    /                         |
 |                                         |   /_________________________/
 +=========================================+
 
 
/boot/kernel/kernel text=0x17c1930 data=0xb93d38+0x557b28 syms=[0x8+0x197400+0x8+0x197f72]
00:02:45 /boot/entropy size=0x1000
00:02:45 Booting...

I wonder what is happening for 2 minutes between loading loader.conf.local and moving forward with the boot process. Enabling boot_verbose doesn't help much since no additional logs were printed.

If you have any ideas what makes pfSense to boot slow or how to debug that problem I would appreciate your help.