Comment 4 for bug 625395

I am also seeing long pauses on boot-up of Maverick (and Lucid was doing it too, before the upgrade), and I use the escape key to continue, however the number of times I press the escape key varies distinctly from 1 to 6 times, so this is probably a race condition. There is usually a dmesg entry right before (or very nearly before) the pause like:

[ 8.085519] udev[446]: starting version 163