Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 07:56:02 -0800 (PST) From: Craig Johnston <caj@tower.stc.housing.washington.edu> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: various questions Message-ID: <199601291556.HAA00509@tower.stc.housing.washington.edu>
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Hello. I have a number of questions regarding FreeBSD: I run FreeBSD on a system with an Asus SP3G mboard, with an amd dx4-100 cpu, and the latest flash bios version. I have 256k cache, and also do have the tag SRAM installed. (this is what it is called? tag-dirty-some- thing-or-other.. the extra piece of SRAM that is supposed to make write-back work ok.) I use the onboard NCR chip and a PCI NIC. (a Boca thingie with the AMD chip that seems to give me too many overruns. The general consensus is that early versions of this card are massively broken, no?) Anyway -- which PCI optimisations in the chipset settings for this motherboard may I safely enable? I currently have all of them except 'PCI posted write' enabled -- PCI to DRAM caching, PCI burst write, etc. I had a random reboot with absolutely no messages at some point after turning on the posted write, which may or may not be related, but I turned it off to be safe. Is it ok, and beneficial to turn these on? I was also told ISA GAT should be off, this is correct? Wish I had more info on the random reboot, but I could find not even a single burp in /var/log/messages, and nothing popped up on the screen before it happened. I was making Octave at the time. (which takes a damn long time!) If someone thinks it would be useful, I'll give full info on my kernel config and system, but it doesn't really look likely there will be enough info without even a diagnostic message to go on. Are there any tweaks for this mboard under FreeBSD? Should I fiddle with PCI latencies, etc? I don't know what half the chipset options mean, and who ever thought of actually documenting a motherboard. :( Second question -- are FreeBSD 2.1 binaries in the distribution compiled with -m486 and other optimisations? Or should I go back and do this? I'm mostly concerned about the shells, window managers and the Xserver. Another question: is it likely there is much I can strip from my kernel besides disabling various things in my kernel config file that will make it smaller? I've got 32 megs in this box but I am concerned with the amt of memory FreeBSD seems to eat, and would like to eliminate every unecessary byte everywhere I can.. perhaps a pointer to info on stripping down FreeBSD? I've already gotten rid of all unecessary daemons etc. and stripped my config file to the bone. (didn't remove npx0 tho.. ;) ) When I do a 'top' under FreeBSD, what exactly do 'active', 'inactive', and 'wired' mean? Wired I take to mean is kernel memory, would this be correct? I am not familar with this terminology.. I'm new to things BSD'ish in general. If any of these things are covered anywhere you can point me to (on the net) please do and don't waste any of your time explaining them. Finally, kudos to the core team -- I am absolutely blown away by this OS. I was running Linux previously, which I liked, but the whole thing was sort of starting to scare me -- nothing specific, just a general "string and chewing gum" feel. From the install onwards FreeBSD had a tight, well-engineered feel that's giving me major warm fuzzies and the performance (esp. disk) is wonderful. Thank you! TIA, craig.
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