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Date:      Sat, 13 Apr 1996 20:51:30 -0700
From:      David Greenman <davidg@Root.COM>
To:        peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva)
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Pentium fast copy? 
Message-ID:  <199604140351.UAA02955@Root.COM>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 13 Apr 1996 20:52:50 CDT." <9604140152.AA14757@sonic.nmti.com.nmti.com> 

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>The following quote from a paper (sorry, I don't know what the paper is
>offhand) appeared on the Firewalls mailing list. What's FreeBSD like on
>this front?
>
>    Our results show that none of the systems adequately delivers the
>    Pentium's memory write performance.  For example, the Pentium can
>    copy data at over 160 megabytes/second using a prefetching copy
>    routine, yet none of the systems we tested have implemented such a
>    routine.  As described below, the prefetching routines address the
>    fact that the Pentium does not have a write-allocate cache.
>    Without this optimization, the same routines copy data at about 40
>    megabytes/second.

   This is a quote from the Usenix '95 paper comparing several PC operating
systems, FreeBSD 2.0.5R being one of them. The bottom line is that we are
working on improving this, but some of the "improvements" were recently found
to be pessimizations in real-world situations. Not much more to say at this
point.

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project



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