[Soekris] Harddisk Slow

[Igor Sobrado]

In message <45C083B7.5060207 at ant.uni-bremen.de>, Heinrich Rebehn writes:
> 
> Actually, using 32K as block size speeds up dd's throughput from 8 to 
> 18MB/s, yet the CPU usage remains ~90% sys.

Hi Heinrich.

I am not a hardware expert at all but, as the bottleneck is in the
system load and even my 400MHz PII laptop has a troughput of 30MB/s
(it runs NetBSD, not OpenBSD!) I would suspect an interrupt routing
problem.  I hope that this problem can be fixed in a future firmware
release.

>From the posts on this thread, I see that dmesg shows these drives
running in UltraDMA mode and no one has complained about disks
being degraded when used.

Can this problem be related with the errors observed when making
new filesystems with newfs in the OpenBSD installation process
if pciide* is enabled?  Before installing OpenBSD on the net4801
I need to do:

  boot bsd.rd -c
  disable pciide
  quit

to avoid these errors.  I wrote "being related", not "being the
same as"... I am aware that the disks are not being degraded
under normal conditions, but newfs is a serious stress test
for the disk controller.

Cheers,
Igor.