From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Apr 22 9:44:49 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from arjun.niksun.com (gw.niksun.com [206.20.52.122]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D4A4D153A0 for ; Thu, 22 Apr 1999 09:44:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ath@niksun.com) Received: from stiegl.niksun.com (stiegl.niksun.com [10.0.0.44]) by arjun.niksun.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA05420 for ; Thu, 22 Apr 1999 12:42:12 -0400 (EDT) Received: from stiegl.niksun.com (localhost.niksun.com [127.0.0.1]) by stiegl.niksun.com (8.8.8/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA08575 for ; Thu, 22 Apr 1999 12:42:12 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from ath@stiegl.niksun.com) Message-Id: <199904221642.MAA08575@stiegl.niksun.com> From: Andrew Heybey To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: SMP nerd toy report Mime-Version: 1.0 (generated by tm-edit 7.108) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 12:42:11 -0400 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG After reading about the hacks to make Celerons do SMP, I decided to give cheap SMP a try for no real good reason except that I wanted to. I bought: DFI P2XBL/D dual Slot 1 motherboard ($192) 2 Celeron 300A socket 370 processors ($65 each) 2 prewired-for-SMP socket 370 to Slot 1 converters (you don't want to see me with a soldering iron) ($22 each) Case, keyboard, 64MB of memory. ($140 total) I had an ethernet card and a disk lying around and I am using a serial console, so for about $500 (plus shipping) I have myself a very fast system. I have been very pleased with it so far. I installed 3.1-RELEASE for now. At 300MHz (66MHz FSB), my worldstone (CFLAGS="-O -pipe", make -j8 buildworld, softupdates, /usr/src & /usr/obj on the same partition of a Maxtor IDE disk) is about 1:15. At 450MHz (100MHz FSB) "make -j8 buildworld" takes about 0:55. (I know, bad hacker. I promise not to submit any PRs unless they can be duplicated at 300MHz.) I expect that if I got a second disk for /usr/obj that the build would really fly. All in all, I'm a happy nerd. One random question: has anyone ever seen a BIOS that works over a serial line? I'm perfectly happy with a serial console except that I have to drag the system within reach of a monitor if I want to change something in the BIOS. Plus I have to waste a slot for a video card unless I also want to install that everytime I want to poke around in the BIOS. andrew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message