At 10:55 -0400 15/5/2002, Sean Davis wrote:
>Thanks very much, I'll try that in a few minutes. The only other thing on my
>mind, is that when my friend was installing the machine, and it was booting
>up, going through init, etc etc, he said the console was *extremely* slow,
>about one line every 3 seconds or so. The machine is a G4 350Mhz, with 512MB
>of RAM, so it sounds like that shouldn't be happening. The only option I
>found in GENERIC that sounded related is OFB_ENABLE_CACHE - will enabling
>that option make console run better?

I think I had reported this problem twice already... it's not a
console issue, it's a system performance issue caused by a bug in
the audio drivers.

Some machines (notably the blue G4s ranging from 400 to 500 mhz) have
a severe problem with the sound driver built into the GENERIC kernel,
they end up having from 4000 to 50000 interrupts per second by the
audio chipset.

*IF* possible on the machine affected by the problem (4 out of 5 tested
here, the only one not having the problem was a cube... maybe because it
does not have onboard sound ? :) all you have to do is to recompile a
kernel without audio support and everything runs smoooth then.

Your mileage may vary in this: one of the machines with the problem
managed to compile a kernel in *only* six hours, another one couldn't
compile an "Hello world" thing in two hours and half (cpu usage 100%
steady by cc1...) ... and of course compiling the kernel there was
out of discussion. I moved a generic kernel without audio stuff and
then the machine recompiled a coustom kernel in a matter of minutes.

As an emergency solution while someone can take a look at it I again
suggest strongly to remove the audio support from the first-installation
kernel.

Ciao,

Andrea aka Nemesi

-- 
Andrea Cocito
Director of the Bioinformatics Research Unit
Department of Experimental Oncology
European Institute of Oncology
Via Ripamonti 435, Milano - Italy
Tel. +39-02-57489857
Fax. +39-02-57489851