Re: Very slow IDE performance

Mike A. Harris (mharris@meteng.on.ca)
Mon, 23 Aug 1999 03:17:00 -0400 (EDT)


On Sun, 22 Aug 1999, Brian Perkins wrote:

>I'm on the "Linux Support Givaway" list, and have been contacted with
>a rather bizarre problem.
>
>She was trying to install RedHat 6 (with kernel 2.2.6, I suppose) on
>an Olivetti Pentium 120, and the Redhat boot disk wasn't working.
>After fixing this problem, she discovered that her performance was
>extremely poor (it took 20 minutes to change the wallpaper) .
>
>The amount of RAM the kernel found was normal, the bogomips value at
>boot was sane (56 or so), and it doesn't thrash, it just takes forever to
>perform any disk activity ( the hdd light is on constantly but it
>isn't constantly seeking).
>
>I had her do hdparm -t , which gave a transfer rate of .38 Megs per
>second. Any ideas on what could cause this? Unfortunately, I don't
>have any information about the chipset and such, though I do have the
>output of hdparm -i:

Sounds like the internal or external CPU cache is disabled, or
both are disabled. I have a 486-DX2-66 here, and it scores 33.18
bogos. I would guess a P120 would be higher than 56 bogos...

Just a shot in the dark..

--
Mike A. Harris                                     Linux advocate     
Computer Consultant                                  GNU advocate  
Capslock Consulting                          Open Source advocate

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