On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 02:21:48PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Took a while to send this, since I wanted to double check what I wrote. > On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 09:17:27PM -0800, Troy Arnold wrote: > > On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 04:46:03PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > - get rid of the VGA VESA frame buffer mode that is enabled in that kernel. > > > > > > This weekend I discovered that you can turn off the vesa frame buffer > > > with a boot time command line option: > > > === > > > video=vga16:off > e > === > > > > Yup, it's documented in Debian's lilo.conf along with: > > #vga=ask > > > > Which gives you some other modes to choose from. The mode that I > > happen to prefer is not in the list: > > vga=0x305 > > I'm am a little puzzled...
Nope, i'm the puzzled one. My fingers got ahead of my brain again: > vga= and video= do completely different things. I see that now... > > There's also the 'hdparm' command: > > hdparm -d 1 -m16 /dev/hda > > -d 1 == turn on DMA > > -m16 == turn on multi-sector IO > > > > These two options vastly improve performance on modern IDE drives. > > Yes, I thought so too... I used to use: -d 1 -m 16 -c 1 -u 1 > > In my own testing I found that multi-block mode doesn't appear to > improve performance if dma mode is available. If dma mode is available > enable that and it's as good as you get. If dma is _not_ available > (because it's a really old IDE drive), then multi-mode helps some. Makes sense, since (as I understand it) the whole point of DMA is to bypass the CPU, while the point of multi-mode is to transfer more stuff per interrupt. I did some more testing and got results similiar to yours: i.e. no real benefit if DMA is already enabled. (I only tested on two machines, using hdparm -t) However, if I have an instance of vmware running, multimode helps significantly: Two tests both with vmware running, but idle. (avg of 5 runs) -m16 Timing buffered disk reads: = ~ 28.32 MB/sec -m0 Timing buffered disk reads: = ~ 23.07 MB/sec More important than numbers -- on a purely subjective level, -m16 helps "a lot" with system interactivity if I have the guest OS copy a bunch of mp3's. -troy _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
