*BSD News Article 22404


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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!agate!doc.ic.ac.uk!uknet!yorkohm!minster!al-b
From: al-b@minster.york.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: FYI.. benchmarks on linux and 386bsd
Message-ID: <750514620.19363@minster.york.ac.uk>
Date: 13 Oct 1993 12:17:00 GMT
References: <750282279.25432@minster.york.ac.uk> <CEq8q0.M3A@veda.is> <1993Oct11.123706.23431@swan.pyr>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England
Lines: 50

In article <1993Oct11.123706.23431@swan.pyr> iiitac@swan.pyr (Alan Cox) writes:
>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.

I will be trying NetBSD soon, honest! :-)
But I doubt I'll get rid of 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]

I do not have *any* IDE hardware in my machine. I can even set the AH-1542C to
IRQ 14 and Linux will still boot perfectly. (DOS is no problem either, but Windows
doesn't like it at all!) I did not try that with 386BSD...

Various "cache test" programs have detected a perfectly normal 256K write-back cache
with Dirty-TAG RAM installed. The board comes from Informtech and uses OPTI 495SX-WB
chipset.

The original 386BSD release seems to be quite out of date from what I have seen, I
guess Bill Jolitz (sp?) doesn't want people mucking around with his release and
hasn't had time to put out a new one... (Still 0.1!!!) Since I first heard of Linux
about a year ago there have been more than three SLS releases.

Linux has a lot more choice in the "ready-to-run" department, but I also want a true
BSD system, so NetBSD here I come..!