*BSD News Article 20631


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From: juliane@belfast.dcd.wa.gov.au (Julian Elischer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: BSD UNIX
Date: 10 Sep 1993 15:56:12 +0800
Organization: Dept of Community Development, Perth, Australia
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Distribution: world
Message-ID: <26pbus$ni8@belfast.dcd.wa.gov.au>
References: <michaelv.747102277@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu> <CCuHI1.M97@eunet.ch> <CCyo6n.LMK@ssesco.com> <1993Sep8.004749.2438@sophia.smith.edu>
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In article <1993Sep8.004749.2438@sophia.smith.edu> jfieber@sophia.smith.edu (J Fieber) writes:
>Well heck, my pokey old un-accelerated Amiga 2000 got better disk
>i/o performance than this spiffy new 486 I'm using now.  I'm
>using the same drives with an (expensive!) Adaptec 1542C.  Pretty
>darn depressing I must say.  The price of EISA controllers
>amounts to highway robbery too.

It's not all the fault of the architecture.
When I first wrote these drivers I wrote them for MACH2.5.

this is a closely related OS and I was running it on the same hardware
(in fact, the same MACHINE)

performance under 386bsd was always considerably less than performance
under mach 2.5, on the same PC.

This is basically an artifact of the newness of the vm and io systems
within 386bsd and derivatives. Work is underway
to rebuild these systems, under both NetBSD and FreeBSD
(no, it's not a duplication, both groups share info)

I expect that within the next 6 months there will be great improvements
in filesystem throughput.
Don't blame bill, or the people who did the vm port..
it's just new code. it needs a good shakedown and it is getting it.
things will improve. The big thing to remember is that
until 0.1, the emphasis was on just getting it running.
Now that it seems to run with some reliablility, we can go back
an look at what is going on inside.


julian