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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!news.ececs.uc.edu!news.kei.com!news.mathworks.com!enews.sgi.com!news.be.com!news1.crl.com!nexp.crl.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Several easy questions about FreeBSD, concerning hardware Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 23:50:55 -0800 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 39 Message-ID: <330C025F.167EB0E7@FreeBSD.org> References: <33047E35.41C6@cs.ubc.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-970215-GAMMA0 i386) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:35791 Markus Meister wrote: > 1) I assume FreeBSD will run very nicely on a "Pentium Pro". Is it > correct that still no dual-CPU system of any kind is supported? > (is it by NetBSD?) The FAQ (http://cynjut.neonramp.com) is marked > 'out of date' on this point. It will run very nicely on that Pentium Pro. There is experimental SMP support that will also probably run fairly well on it, but you'll be out on the bleeding edge. :-) I hear they're still having some trouble with multiple FPUs. > 2) What kind of performance increase can I expect of your average > SCSI drive over (shudder!) EIDE? The former is unfortunately a > lot more expensive. If you're doing a lot of I/O, you may expect significant performance increases with SCSI. With a SCSI drive & controller, the CPU can just say "Hey, you, you're pretty smart - go get me these blocks and stick 'em here in memory. And let me know when you're done, I'm off to do other things." All the early (and/or cheap) IDE drives require considerably more in the way of handshaking for every byte transferred - they're not smart enough to do it all by themselves and they need a lot of the CPU's help. Some of the more modern IDE drives are a bit more intelligent where this is concerned, though still no match for SCSI when it comes to stringing lots of disk, tape & CD devices in a line and not having them fight for the bus (assuming they all support bus attach/detach properly, and all but the really old ones do). All around, SCSI just *better* than IDE. :-) > 3) Is there anything else I should know? I would really like a nice > FreeBSD machine. I will be grateful for any advice. Get yourself a nice Matrox Millenium 4Mb card since appearance is also everything. :-) -- - Jordan Hubbard FreeBSD core team / Walnut Creek CDROM.