On Wednesday 06 December 2000 03:46, you wrote:
> Hi all. Wondering if anyone knows what 'idebus' is and if there are any
> settings for this. I'm using Mandrake 7.1, and upon boot, there is a line
> that reads : ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override
> with idebus=66. My ASUS board is a P5SB with an AMD K6-2/400 and 192 meg
> ram. Isn't this a 100 MHz board? Would this be causing my system to run
> slower than I feel it should? I don't feel that I'm getting anywhere near
> the performance I should be getting.
>
> Thanks for your consideration...
There are several buses on the board. The Front Side Bus handles memory and
processor, and bridges to PCI and possibly ISA buses. That Front Side Bus is
the one you hear so miuch about--The PCI bus runs nominally at 33MHz and the
ISA Bus somewhere close to 8MHz. PCI is short for peripheral connect
Interface, and ISA is short for Industry Standard Architecture, which is a
dying standard.
The IDE bus is for disk drives with Integrated Drive Electronics. It runs at
several speeds and modes, depending on the technoilogy of the drives attached
AND the capabilities of the motherboard. A 66MHz IDE bus is relatively new,
though the 33MHz bus has been with us since 1998. There is little to show
for the extra speed, and the special connecting cables except an occasional
burst mode transfer speed increase, despite all the advertising hype. The
true value of the bus and the architecture is that it deviated from
programmed input/output (where the processor had to intervene in reads and
writes) to Direct Memory Access (where the processor is interrupted when the
transfer is complete)
If this is really slow, there are several things that might be happening
In a terminal type
free
and see how much memory is being used. It should show how much the system
recognizes and how much is free (don't expect much to be free, linux believes
unused memory is wasted memory, and memory accesses/caches are a LOT faster
than disk). If it shows 64M, then you need to add this to /etc/lilo.conf in
the paragraph with label=linux
append="mem=183m"
192 might be OK, but that number I gave you won't cause a lock-up if you have
built-in AGP sharing part of your memory, which the SiS530 Chipset does use.
You will experience considerable speed increase by disabling the on-board AGP
and adding a separate video card, except it would have to be PCI. An ancient
Voodoo II PCI accelerator board with the 3dfx linux drivers would also
probably improve the situation (you plug it in, put your video output to it
then take its video out to your monitor.) XFree-4.01 does NOT provide
accelerated support for the 530, so XFree86-3.3.6 is a better bet because it
provides acceleration in 16 bit color depth for the 530.
I have used three 530-based computers. None were speed demons, but none ever
had a hiccup, and one of them ran 213 days between power failure caused
reboots.
Civileme
>
> --
> Glenn Johnson
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Registered Linux user #175132
> Powered by Linux-Mandrake 7.1
