From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Jul 15 19:28:18 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B0B4516A4CE for ; Thu, 15 Jul 2004 19:28:18 +0000 (GMT) Received: from out006.verizon.net (out006pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.106]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 43C0743D49 for ; Thu, 15 Jul 2004 19:28:18 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from [192.168.1.3] ([68.161.84.3]) by out006.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.06.06 201-253-122-130-106-20030910) with ESMTP id <20040715192817.HLDD3317.out006.verizon.net@[192.168.1.3]>; Thu, 15 Jul 2004 14:28:17 -0500 Message-ID: <40F6DAC9.9020403@mac.com> Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:28:09 -0400 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.1) Gecko/20040707 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Wojciech Puchar References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out006.verizon.net from [68.161.84.3] at Thu, 15 Jul 2004 14:28:17 -0500 cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD beginner (NetBSD advanced) X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 19:28:18 -0000 Wojciech Puchar wrote: > i installed FreeBSD once to do quick performance tests, and at least in > disk I/O and fair scheduling it's MUCH better (tested 4.10 and 5.1). It's nice to be welcomed by higher performance when you switch OSes. :-) > my questions: > > 1) what is Buf and Cache in top exactly? why buf on 96MB machine gets to > near 20MB and never goes down? it's almost 1/4 of memory size. Cache: number of pages used for VM-level disk caching Buf: number of pages used for BIO-level disk caching > 2) can i compile kernel with -march=pentium,pentium[234] -O2 optimization? > in NetBSD 2.0 doing -march=pentium produces kernel that doesn't boot at > all, just resets. If you want to tune your system, tweaking the options from GENERIC by removing at least: cpu I386_CPU cpu I486_CPU ...will probably result in the greatest improvement, along with disabling WITNESS and such if using -CURRENT. See "man tuning". Using -march=pentium is likely to be worthwhile (assuming you don't have a 386 :-), higher than that may run into problems. Higher optimizations than -O are not supported, although work is underway to fix the remaining code issues (mainly in libalias used by NAT), as I understand. If you want to try -O2, give it a shot, but you might consider using either "-Os" rather than "-O2", or try "-O2 -fno-strict-aliasing". > 3) how can i disable compiling, using etc.. all that LKM (KLD) stuff? > > i really prefer one static kernel. Read the handbook on building the kernel. > 4) is IPv6 working well? (i mean no crashes etc...) i will get real IPv6 > zone allocation soon and want to use it. IPv6 seems to work well, yes. > 5) what is used in FreeBSD for traffic management. NetBSD has altq - > please just give me a name i will RTFM. If you want to use that, ipf/altq should be available in -CURRENT. Otherwise, ipfw & dummynet is another choice. > 6) how to turn using serial port as console on i386? my home machine is > headless, i'm using X terminals to access it. See the handbook. > 7) does FreeBSD support 2 CPUs on i386? Sure. See the SMP section of the kernel config file. > should i go to 4.10 or better 5.2.1? stability is really important to me. 4.10, unless there's a feature from -CURRENT that you don't want to live without. -- -Chuck