On February 14, 2005 08:59 am, Brent Kilgore wrote:
> Whoh cool, you can do that?  Forgive me for asking, I'm sure you have a
> good reason, but why? I can see having a netboot front end.  Is it that
> someone somewhere had a huge underutilized file server?  (as I think of the
> 2.8TB server upstairs doing nothing except humming and awaiting a "use"...
> damn government budget rules :) )

Why?  Because I wanted no fan/HDD noise in the family room.  Now true, the XPC 
has two fans (power supply and processor) but both are temperature-controlled 
and once the thing's booted the fans never seem to come on, or if they are 
on, they're so quiet I don't mind.  I did have to replace the ones that came 
iwth the XPC with better (quieter) ones but for $30 hell it's worth it.  :-)

> Ooh idea, not original I'm sure, where can I get a sub sub sub micro sized
> netboot dumb terminal (cheap preferably)? I remember seeing one used in our
> library that was about the size of a small laptop back when they had hopes
> of controlling people's use of the internet.

Sure but again, why use specialized hardware?  Especially in a cash-strapped 
situation like a library or school.  Look at LTSP, the Linux Terminal Server 
Project.  Use any system that can boot PXE, or install any network card that 
has a boot ROM and is supported with Linux.  I know of one company that has 
50 systems (all off-lease Dell P2/266-ish systems) with cheapo RTL8139 cards 
with boot ROMs from etherboot.org.  Works like a charm and the maintenance on 
the actual desktops are next to nil since everything is stored on the server.

> But anyways, if you can run a bi-directional video stream over 100mbits/s
> (I assume) Ethernet then the pci bus (127Mbytes/s?) should be bored to
> death. Which brings be back to my conclusion of DMA sharing deadlock. The
> motherboard/kernel getting confused on who is doing what with DMA and
> thereby assuming someone still has a lock on the channel and not freeing
> it. Until another packet of info knocks it back into order (the packet from
> ssh) and things start flowing again.

Well that sounds like a system problem and is beyond the scope of this 
discussion -- fix or replace your hardware, or figure out how to make Linux 
route around the braindead system issues.

> I remember back from the DOS days you had to set a DMA and IRQ channel
> manually.  Does that still hold today?  I know windows (and I suppose Linux
> also) has the capability of sharing those DMA and IRQ channels.  In windows
> sometimes you have to override the IRQ.  Would manually fiddling with the
> DMA's help any?  Or is this obsolete thinking?

I'm not sure.  I understand ISA DMA (which sucked) and I know a little about 
PCI DMA, but only enough to be dangerous.  I have been learning from Paul 
Mundt (the linux-sh maintainer) but the education is slow and painful.  :-)

-A.


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