On Sat, Dec 29, 2001 at 11:32:28PM -0600, Richard Rauch wrote:
> I have one system that's an Athlon (800MHz) tower.  Another is a plain
> Pentium (233MHz) laptop.
> 
> I've noticed that starting applications on the Athlon tower seems to take
> a long time.  xosview (from pkgsrc) registers anywhere from about 70K to
> around 300K of disk activity (it varies up and down) during the long wait
> before an application comes up.  (Once the information has come up and is
> cached, the next launch of the same application is much faster.)
> 
> On the other hand, the *much* slow laptop brings things up in a more
> reasonable time frame.
> 
> As an example in contrast, starting X on the tower results in a *quite*
> slow scroll of the various lines of output.  Meanwhile, starting X via
> startx on the laptop zips the output past and then X appears in relatively
> little time.
> 
> 
> I can think of the following differences:
> 
>  * The tower is running 1.5, while the laptop is running 1.5.2.
>    But, I seem to recall that the tower didn't behave like this in
>    the past...
> 
> [...]
>  * The tower is running a VIA chipset.

It's possible that NetBSD doesn't use DMA for you disk on the tower.
Can you post your dmesg to see what chipset this is exactly ?

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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