Hi all, For the first time, I installed a parport scanner under Linux, and it is incredibly sloooooowww! Now I have read kernel docs and sane docs for a while, but it seems I am either missing the decisive point, or scanning with Linux is really that slow... Could anyone here shed some light on this? I have googled for "linux scanner parallel EPP" and things like that, but did not find much useful.
What do we have? - Pentium 120 MHz, 96 MB RAM, 128 MB swap - Linux 2.2.19 or 2.4.10 - Scanner Mustek 600 III EP plus - sane 1.0.9 with mustek_pp backend Now it takes about a minute for a preview, and about three minutes to scan an A4 page at 300 dpi. This seems pretty slow to me - or am I expecting too much? The BIOS parport setting is EPP (I also tried ECP/EPP), and dmesg says: ... parport0: PC-style at 0x378 [PCSPP,TRISTATE,EPP] parport0: cpp_daisy: aa5500ff(38) parport0: assign_addrs: aa5500ff(38) parport0: cpp_daisy: aa5500ff(38) parport0: assign_addrs: aa5500ff(38) lp0: using parport0 (polling). ... Does this mean EPP is really used? Would be nice... But if not it would explain that it is slow. Is there a way to explicitly tell the kernel parport driver to use EPP? I did not find anything in the boot parameter docs. I have switched off the "niceload" option in the sane config. So the CPU gets nicely loaded, but scanning is still very slow. The CPU load actually is "full", and BTW so it is for the cat process that runs when I print. Why does parport stuff load the CPU so heavily? The data rate is not really high enough to justify this. Or is it the inefficiency of the polling? I am not (yet) a parport expert... Another strange thing is that whenever I start xscanimage, it will modprobe for usbcore for quite a while, before it finally gives up and starts. But I have configured the mustek_pp - so it should not worry about USB at all. Scanning does not seem to be one of the strong sides of Linux... I would appreciate any comments / experience reports related to this. Cheers, Helmut. +----------------+ | Helmut Walle | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +----------------+
