Date: Sat, 01 Apr 1995 09:24:56 -0800 From: "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@estienne.CS.Berkeley.EDU> To: Brian Tao <taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw> Cc: FREEBSD-CURRENT-L <freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: New installation notes Message-ID: <199504011724.JAA10069@estienne.cs.berkeley.edu> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 01 Apr 1995 19:19:27 %2B0800." <Pine.BSI.3.91.950401184804.1567a-100000@aries.ibms.sinica.edu.tw>
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> I just spent the better part of my Saturday afternoon helping a
>colleague get started with FreeBSD. 90% of the problems were, as
>usual, due to the idiosyncratic PC hardware architecture. ;-) I want
>to fire off this note while the experience is still fresh in my mind
>because there are a few things that can be improved upon.
>
> Hardware is a 90-MHz Pentium, ASUS motherboard (not sure which
>one, but it uses the SiS chipset), Adaptec AHA-2940 controller, two
>Quantum Maverick 540-meg drives (sd0 is FreeBSD, sd1 is MS-DOS),
>Accton NE2000-compatible Ethernet, Phoenix Vision864 S3 PCI graphics
>card (1 megabyte) and 16 megabytes of RAM.
>
> Initially the kernel was having trouble with the 2940, reportings
>errors during boot such as "cmd fail" or "ahc0: board not responding".
>After fiddling with the system for half an hour, it was finally able
>to boot up to the installation stage. I'm not quite sure what I did
>to make it work. I suspect it may have something to do with changing
>its IRQ from 12 to 10, and/or pulling out the SB/AWE32 sound card
>(which is on IRQ 5) and the attached NEC Multispin 4x CD-ROM drive.
>
Did you ever reattach the Nec 4x? It was either that or a conflicting
IRQ.
> Once everything was installed, I rebooted with kernel -c (to
>accomodate ed1 on IRQ 15), edited a handful of /etc files, rebooted
>again and created the user accounts. All in all, pretty smooth
>sailing once the kernel could recognize the Adaptec. I ran iozone to
>check it out but it could only muster around 1.7MB/sec read/write
>while my 486DX4/100 NCR-equipped system hits 2.5-2.6MB/sec. Both used
>"iozone 50 65536" and were handling a normal multiuser load with no
>swapping occurring. I need to recompile the kernel anyway and I'll
>try Justin's new aic7xxx drivers at the same time.
Were you using the exact same drives? The best test would be to place
the controllers in the same machine and test against the same exact drives.
I'm been getting ~5MB/s out of the driver for some time now to a Quantum
Empire 2100.
>
> BTW, the proud owner is thoroughly impressed with what he can do
>with his machine now. :) In fact, he hinted that wiping out his
>MS-DOS drive and replacing it with more UNIX file space is a definite
>possibility. :)
Another convert!!! :)
>--
>Brian ("Though this be madness, yet there is method in't") Tao
>taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw <-- work ........ play --> taob@io.org
>
--
Justin T. Gibbs
==============================================
TCS Instructional Group - Programmer/Analyst 1
Cory | Po | Danube | Volga | Parker | Torus
==============================================
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