On Wed, Jan 20, 1999 at 05:27:56PM -0500, Brian Cully wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 17, 1999 at 04:35:47PM -0800, Neil A. Carson wrote:
> > kim@pvv.ntnu.no wrote:
> > 
> > > All the versions of Linux I have worked with, including Sparc versions,
> > > has been much stabler, and frendlier than NetBSD on ARM32.
> > 
> > Do you say that with any authority? Do you know that an ARM Linux system
> > freezes as soon as you run 3 xv's? Or you can't run two telnets, a find
> > and an MPEG player at once without it bucketing over? Or some people
> > who've tried to run the OS on commercial systems and have ended up
> > banging their head against the wall _so_ many times? While it might be
> > faster (though these days, not very much) it's certainly not easier to
> > install either (OK, NetBSD is hard, but Linux is even harder).
> 
> I'd have a hard time believing that as well, since all the problems
> I've seen with NetBSD/arm32 have been with the egcs' code generation
> causing SEGVs. I don't think Linux would be free of that problem.
> 
> The kernel and userland appears to be pretty stable, though slow
> (was I wrong in thinking that a 233 MHz SA-110 should be about as
> fast as my P166 or faster?).

Even with a PIO-only (due to the ISA-bus controller) IDE disk, my Shark
feels almost as fast as my 120MHz Cyrix "P150" system did.  Now that
I've upgraded that machine to a 350MHz K6-2 with 100MHz memory it
feels a _lot_ faster, to the point that the Shark feels noticeably slow.

The Shark always felt slow if I tried to do either of two things:

	* Compile code with -O2 -- gcc -O2 on the arm32 is SLOW!
	* Hit the disk much (e.g. compile a kernel without MFS /tmp
	  and without -pipe) -- the PIO IDE generates a lot of interrupts
	  *and* sucks a lot of cycles.

Of course, xlock screensavers and some games run very slowly, too, because
they make extensive use of floating-point math and the StrongARM has no FPU.

-- 
Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
	"And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?"