On zaterdag, november 16, 2002, at 09:24 AM, jpy@zebis.com wrote:

> I'm just curious what other people are doing with their setups.. I am 
> now up and running with my SE/30, and although I didn't expect it to 
> be fast, when I started compiling ircII today at 2pm I didn't expect 
> it to still be going at 2am. I have no real purpose for this machine, 
> but I guess I was hoping I could mess around with it a little more. At 
> this rate I'm really kind of afraid to try compiling or extracting 
> anything else. If anyone is running a Quadra 840av (40mhz 040), what 
> is it like? I have one that I could get going, but I would have to get 
> some memory and a hard drive for it..

I've got a Quadra 840AV with 80MB running NetBSD 1.6K. The machine is 
surprisingly fast at compiling tasks etc. but IO is very slow, due to 
the hardware DMA engine not being supported. Most 68k Macs use PIO to 
communicate between the memory and IO devices, but the AV Quadra's have 
a hardware DMA chip, which speeds up Mac OS greatly, but isn't 
supported under NetBSD and therefore has to be emulated, which is much 
slower even than using PIO.

However, work is being done to support the DMA engine (I think by 
Michael R. Zucca and Hauke Fath). I don't know what the current status 
is.

-- 
Reinier Jonker