Subject: Re: Boot Floppy Available
To: None <perry@piermont.com>
From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
List: port-alpha
Date: 10/20/1997 17:26:50
On Mon, 20 Oct 1997 15:54:50 -0400 
 "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> wrote:

 > the Riz writes:
 > > Well, it seems very close to working on my Alphastation 255, 128M RAM.  I
 > > got it to boot (REALLY slowly... about 5 minutes to load the
 > > kernel),
 > 
 > We had this problem when we started out with i386 compressed boot
 > floppies. It turned out we were reading sector at a time instead of
 > track at a time -- dramatically altered performance because the thing
 > ended up having to spin once for every sector :(
 > 
 > Bet you may have something to fix there, Curt.

For what it's worth, the PowerPC port has the same problem, using the
OpenFirmware's disk i/o routines.  Probably the SPARC port, too.

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                            Home: +1 408 866 1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                       Work: +1 415 604 0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                             Pager: +1 415 428 6939