Today, Derek Martin gleaned this insight:
> I've been tracking the linux-kernel ml, and there are indeed performance
> problems with 2.4.0-test2. These have a lot to do with brokenness in the
> VM code. However, Alan Cox has been working on them, and there are fixes
> to them which improves drastically the performance (as seen by another
> person who tested it with bonnie++), if you use the test2-ac1 kernel you
> should get much better results.
>
> I haven't downloaded it yet, but I will be getting it SOON. :) I'll
> report on my success at that time.
Ok I DL'd Alan Cox's patch, and it made a huge difference. The benchmark
results are still a tad slower, but not too much... may be attributable to
random kaka that my system was doing at the time. Bottom line is I'm
happy with it. Though I still want to test it with the 2.2.13 kernel
because someone told me there was a substantial drop between 2.2.14 (which
I don't have floating around) and 2.2.15 in the I/O subsystem.
As for this new (patched) kernel, The system seems to be performing well,
all of the subsystems I make use of on my desktop machine seem to be
working fine, and I really like what they've done with the FB console
support -- so much so that I may start using it a lot more often. if you
have a supported video card and a monitor that can handle it, you can get
160x64 character console @ 1280x1024x256 @ 75Hz which I think is really
cool. I'm pretty sure it will do higher res and more colors but I don't
see much of a point so I haven't played with it any further.
X is nice and all but most of the apps I use a lot run fine in a virtual
console and that means much less overhead, so they run faster. Only
exception is netscape but I don't have much time for browsing lately
anyway... perhaps I'll take a serious look at replacing it with lynx :)
The one thing I still have yet to look at is running say, Quake 3 Arena in
X with the DRI support (the new kernel supports this directly). I'd
suspect that this would make a substantial difference, and may FINALLY
mean I can actually make use of my TNT2 Ultra! :)
I think I'll hold off on trying to get this kernel up and running on my
laptop until someone releases a distro based on the new kernel... I'd
imagine that will be quite a chore, with integrating the PCMCIA support
and all. Though I think I heard somewhere that the PCMCIA stuff was going
to be integrated into the kernel proper... Don't know if that has happened
yet or not. Didn't look into it.
--
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Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek
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