On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, NetBSD Mailing list wrote:

> Transfer of sets via FTP is EXTREMELY slow on the vs3100.  sysinst was 
> reporting just over 32KB/s via the local ethernet.  This may indeed be
> typical for the 3100, but it's news to me considering it's the first
> time I've gotten these puppies going now.

It's not the ethernet fault, it's the SCSI disk I/O bottleneck you're
seeing as the files get written to your SCSI disk.

> And clearly, as has already been stated many times before, the SCSI
> performance is horrid.  This is evident during the set extractions.
> That fact alone should be enough to keep me using on the mvII for 
> development production while looking into my own SCSI improvement 
> endeavours on the 3100.  (Is anyone else already currently working 
> on the DMA issues here?)

You should try it on a 6Meg VAXstation 2000 using a SCSI disk on the
interface provided for TK50Z drives.  Reads alone from the disk clock in
at about 28KB/s.  The install from NFS to the SCSI drive on the VS2000
took in excess of 6hrs, but it works without a hitch.  The tricky part is
then booting the VS2000 since you can't boot from disk devices attached to
its internal SCSI controller.  You could boot it from a network loaded
bootloader, or you should be able to bootstrap it from an internal RX33
but we've not gotten an RX33 boot disk built yet.

> Nonetheless, the boot.fs image is working as expected and without a
> hitch.  A previous mention from another tester mentioned swap issues
> while only having 4mb RAM available.   With that aside, it appears
> the boot.fs is where it should be.  I'll know the final turnout in
> a few hours after the extractions complete (!!)

I fought my way through a 4Meg install with the new 1.4.1 boot disk image
once, but it was a very precarious task.  It can be done, but I'd not
recommend it.  Installation on a 6Meg system has been verified to work
hands free.  I suspect installs will also work fine on 5Meg systems but
it's untested.  4Meg systems require that some sort of swap be
successfully enabled before sysinst will run correctly.  Based on two
peoples experiences, it looks like the odds so far are 50/50 wrt to
getting this to work.

-brian.
---
Brian "JARAI" Chase | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ | VAXZilla LIVES!!!