Raspberry Pi port, piCore-15.0 is available!
... so it might be hardware.
Opening MC from a GUI with Xvesa in a VM is instantaneous for me...
tsc: Fast TSC calibration failedtsc: Unable to calibrate against PITtsc: using PMTIMER reference calibration
Booted 5.0Alpha in a VM I noticed this message fly by during boot, Quotetsc: Fast TSC calibration failedtsc: Unable to calibrate against PITtsc: using PMTIMER reference calibration
Fwiw, tce-load -i firefox.tcz from inside tce4/optional works and runs just fine under tc5 as long as lipng12.so* are copied from tc4's Xlibs.tcz into /usr/lib.