On Thu, 28 Dec 2000, NetBSD Bob wrote:

> [...]
>
> As to problems.  The rc.d is a killer on the slow machines.
> I can only speak for MVII boxes, but maybe someone will roll
> up an 11/750 for testing 1.5 on and report back.

This, I think we can fix.  Try David Brownlee's replacement rc.subr
that he sent to list today in order to see if that helps some.

> The slowness in the tcpip stacks is another problem.  The
> 1.5 takes a big hit in 1.5 compared to 1.4.3, on the same
> machine....MVII/DEQNA.  The 1.4.3 easily runs 220k/s, but
> the 1.5 can only muster up 150k/s.  That may or may not
> be important, but if one relies on ftp installs, for example,
> that is significant.

Definitely, this is not good.  If 1.5 is performing at only 68% of what
1.4.3 offered, something's not so good.  Given the addition of IPv6 and
friends, maybe some inefficiencies have bee introduced into the networking
stack.  This one is going to need work to track down.  Someone mentioned
turning on kernel profiling, which I think is a good first step.

> Another problem is that there is no good booting scheme for
> the early machines, except for tape, and that does not yet
> exist in 1.5. [...]

This is more of an general install subsystem problem.  There's no reason
this can't work under the 1.5 series.  Brownlee did some minor hacking and
I did rather thorough testing of sysinst installs from tape, disk, and the
network under the 1.4.1 release.  This included machines that had as
little as 5Megs of RAM and that were as slow as MicroVAX-IIs and
VAXstation 2000s.

David Brownlee bundled up the diffs for the work on 1.4.1 at:
  ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.4.1/vax/vaxdiffs.gz

Applying these to 1.5 will require some manual inspection I'm sure.  I
still need to get 1.5 up and running at home before I can help here. In
the meantime, if someone beats me to fixing up the install, I won't be
sad. :-)

-brian.
--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----
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