Hi CLUG members,

Here is one that would have been nice for the troubleshooting night,
but I did not yet have it at that time...

When I got an Asus P/I-P55SP4V board with Cyrix 6x86 some days ago, I
thought this would be a nice upgrade as compared to my old 486... So I
disassembled everything and reassembled it with the "new" motherboard.
My old Miro VLB graphics card does not fit in any more, but since the
Asus board has an on-board VGA controller, this should be no problem -
I thought.

New config:
- Asus P/I-P55SP4V motherboard / Cyrix 6x86-P150+ @ 120 MHz (rated f)
- On-board SiS 5596 chip with 2 MB shared video RAM
- 96 MB in four SIMMs
- Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller (PCI)
- One SCSI disk
- One IDE disk as master on IDE 1
- HP CD-writer as slave on IDE 1 / hdb=ide-scsi
- Logitech Waveman audio (EISA)

All equipment except the motherboard has been used for a long time
before in the old 486 without any problems.

What did I do?

- Set the shared video RAM in the BIOS to maximum (2 MB)
- Looked up the graphics chipset with lspci
- Configured X 3.3.6 accordingly using the XF86_SVGA as the doc says
  for this controller (newer X does not support the chip)

Result: X is running, but incredibly slooooowwww! And not only that,
but the whole machine goes like with brakes on. For instance, top
requires 15 % CPU (in text mode it takes only 4 %, and that should not
change much only because X is running). All processes need more CPU
time to complete a certain given task than they did before!

I am running the same 2.2.19 kernel as before, only recompiled it for
the CPU change.

I have a vague feeling that this thing might have something to do with
interrupts, but I do not know where to look further. I searched the
net for known problems with that motherboard and Linux, but there is
not much about that board at all. The doc for that chipset and X is
almost non-existing.

To be able to work, I now put in an Avance Logic VGA card that is
supported by the same XF86_SVGA, and it is _much_ faster and does not
give the impression everything slows down.

Anyone here with pointers or experience? I would be grateful for
comments on this.

Regards,

Helmut.

+----------------+
| Helmut Walle   |
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
+----------------+


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