Subject: Re: Performance on Transmeta Crusoe
To: None <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: Christos Zoulas <christos@tac.gw.com>
List: current-users
Date: 01/15/2005 12:32:50
In article <20050115171001.GA1137@enterprise.starfleet>,
Lasse Kliemann  <lasse-list-current-users-netbsd-2004@plastictree.net> wrote:
>-=-=-=-=-=-
>
>* sigsegv@rambler.ru writes:
>> Lasse Kliemann wrote:
>> >
>> >I am using 2.99.11 on my notebook, a Desknote A530 with a Transmeta Crusoe 
>> >processor. I know that this notebook isn't the fastest one in the world, 
>> >but the performance was always acceptable under Linux. However, with 
>> >NetBSD it seems to be significantly slower in some aspects. The Crusoe is 
>> >clocked around 600 MHz, and I run NetBSD on an 650 MHz Athlon just fine 
>> >with excelent performance. Hence, I believe it must be some special issue 
>> >for the Crusoe.
>> >
>> >In particular, Mozilla and Firefox (from Pkgsrc) are very, very slow. For 
>> >one, the user inteface responds with large delays. Opening a menu can take 
>> >about 3 seconds. I first see a black recangle (where the menu is to 
>> >appear) and then, after some more moments, the menu pops up, finally.
>> 
>> You don't say how much RAM you have, firefox eats up a lot of memory, 
>> sounds like your processes are being swapped to disk very often
>
>dmesg talks about 224 MB available memory, but I am having trouble matching 
>this with the output of top:
>
>Memory: 101M Act, 56M Inact, 1260K Wired, 39M Exec, 57M File, 12M Free
>Swap: 512M Total, 9532K Used, 503M Free
>
>I do not believe that Firefox is doing a lot of swapping, because the LED for 
>the harddisk is quiet most of the time, and obviously there is very few 
>swapspace used.

Does top show pagedaemon running? Does vmstat 1 show paging? If it is 
paging, you can give processes more memory by running down vm.execmax
and vm.filemax.

>
>However, I found something else (which I should have noticed before) in the 
>output of dmesg:
>
>NetBSD 2.99.11 (GENERIC) #0: Tue Dec 21 12:53:55 UTC 2004
>	netbsd@stargazer:/home/netbsd/obj/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
>total memory = 239 MB
>avail memory = 224 MB
>BIOS32 rev. 0 found at 0xfda40
>mainbus0 (root)
>cpu0 at mainbus0: (uniprocessor)
>cpu0: Transmeta Crusoe (586-class), 599.31 MHz, id 0x543
>cpu0: Processor revision 1.3.1.3
>cpu0: Code Morphing Software Rev: 4.2.7-8-278
>cpu0: 20011004 02:04 official release 4.2.7#7
>cpu0: LongRun mode: 1  <600MHz 1600mV 100%>
>cpu0: features 84893f<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,CX8,SEP>
>cpu0: features 84893f<CMOV,PN,MMX>
>cpu0: "Transmeta(tm) Crusoe(tm) Processor TM5600"
>cpu0: serial number 0000-0543-0000-3118-0E05-A7A1
>pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1
>pci0: i/o space, memory space enabled, rd/line, rd/mult, wr/inv ok
>pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0
>pchb0: Transmeta LongRun Northbridge (rev. 0x01)
>Transmeta SDRAM Controller (RAM memory) at pci0 dev 0 function 1 not configured
>Transmeta BIOS Scratchpad (RAM memory) at pci0 dev 0 function 2 not configured
>
>That doesn't look good, does it? Maybe my RAM is not accessed properly and 
>hence very slow? That would explain why memory-hungry applications run
>so slowly.

No that does not matter.

>But then I did some digging on this and found
>http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-i386/2002/10/11/0003.html
>which suggest that this is normal.
>
>
>Another idea of mine is that it is connected with the LongRun support. I've 
>read that it can be configured via sysctl. Anyone knows an example to tune for 
>more performance this way? Energy consumption is no problem (as long as the 
>notebook does not become too hot), because it is almost always connected to a 
>power socket.

sysctl -a | grep longrun

But that should not matter either.

christos