*BSD News Article 22207


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.linux
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uknet!cf-cm!cybaswan!iiitac
From: iiitac@swan.pyr (Alan Cox)
Subject: Re: FYI.. benchmarks on linux and 386bsd
Message-ID: <1993Oct11.123706.23431@swan.pyr>
Organization: Swansea University College
References: <1993Oct6.184325.11583@finbol.toppoint.de> <750282279.25432@minster.york.ac.uk> <CEq8q0.M3A@veda.is>
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1993 12:37:06 GMT
Lines: 26

In article <CEq8q0.M3A@veda.is> adam@veda.is (Adam David) writes:
>al-b@minster.york.ac.uk writes:
>
>>386BSD will only boot off the harddisk if the internal cache is disabled AND the
>>external cache is disabled AND the turbo button is disabled.
>
>To be quite frank, your motherboard is garbage. It would be possible for 386bsd
>to jump through hoops (and take a performance hit) to run on it, just like I
>presume Linux does, but you would be better off with a motherboard that has
>working cache hardware. Sometime later, it is likely that the current versions
>of *BSD will support broken hardware, but not yet.
Linux doesn't jump through any hoops. I guess BSD doesn't jump through the 
proper ones. With respect to this I'd suggest the original author tries the
current NETBSD. The old 386BSD had so many bugs with device drivers and general
memory handling that have been fixed that NetBSD may well work. On the other 
hand I'll stick to Linux.
>In the meantime, make sure motherboards do caching correctly and make sure
>IDE cards handle things correctly. Otherwise you will see nothing but grief.
>I have been through both of these pitfalls and now have a stable *BSD system
>that is running on _working_ hardware. The bad hardware cannot be returned
>to the store, but someone will want to run DOS on it.
Good advice for all barring IDE cards don't cause any cache problems because 
neither Linux nor BSD use IDE DMA mode, and since IDE drives that support it
are as common as a live dodo. 

Alan [iiitac@pyr.swan.ac.uk]