[Soekris] Harddisk Slow

[Igor Sobrado]

In message <17500.1170266689 at natasha.tepid.org>, Tobias Weingartner writes:
> On Wednesday, January 31, David Young wrote:
> > 
> > Sorry to ask such a basic question, but when you say "the interrupt load,"
> > do you mean that the %CPU spent processing interrupts is higher, or do you
> > mean that the number of interrupts per work done by the IDE controller
> > is higher?  I ask because it makes sense to me that the %CPU would be
> > higher than on your PowerEdge 350, however, it doesn't immediately make
> > sense to me that the number of interrupts would be higher.
> 
> Possibly both?  I mean, the two pieces of machinery are not even on
> the same planet.  Different IDE controllers, different capabilities,
> etc ad nauseum.

Hi Tobias and David!

Indeed, there are different computers and even operating systems
in this thread.  Certainly, the PowerEdge 350 is not comparable
to a net4801, even if the PowerEdge only requires a 75W power
supply unit.  Both my laptop and the PowerEdge are running
NetBSD right now, I am considering a migration to OpenBSD on some
machines but at this time only the net4801 is running OpenBSD.

However, there is a new thread on misc@ (an OpenBSD mailing list)
about performance problems with pciide on the sparc64 architecture.
I suppose that this problem can be related with the one described
here.  The thread (just started, but the problem has been nicely
outlined by Rolf Sommerhalder) has this subject:

  High Interrupt Load cased by pciide with sparc64 on SUN V210

It can be found here:

  http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=117027330031702&w=2

It seems that pciide0 generates interrupts at a very high rate
(there is a permanent interrupt load between 30% and 60%, and
the v210 does not have a low-end processor).

If there is a problem with OpenBSD, I am sure the development
team will release a patch very soon.  They work really hard to
fix problems in the operating system.

David, don't know if this answer is what you are looking for.
Perhaps the information provided by Sommerhalder on his thread
will provide a better feedback.

I will try to move my laptop to OpenBSD this weekend and see
what happens.

Best regards,
Igor.