Suse 10 Review

[Tim Writer]

Peter <plp-ysDPMY98cNQDDBjDh4tngg at public.gmane.org> writes:

> On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, Paul King wrote:
> 
> > I wasn't so easily impressed. It is nice Linux is getting any attention at all in
> > the major media. But of the "smorgasbord" of software he mentions -- no mention
> > of OpenOffice? I have to react with amusement as to what they were trying to do.
> >
> > I am surprised that he only went as low as a 466 MHz processor. I didn't think
> > Suse would have set the hardware "bar" so high.
> >
> > However, I attempted an install of a fairly recent distro (2.2 kernel, if I
> > recall), which ended up running slow on a 486DX-33 (32 MB RAM) I had (and still
> > have). And I don't just mean slower, but even the TTY console was intolerably
> > slow. Has there been an actual abandonment of certain hardware it used to
> > support, which they would now deem "legacy"?
> 
> The tty on a 33MHz machine is slow, period. I still have 33MHz machines (two)
> that work and they are slow slow. That's the way it is. 33MHz machines have
> problems keeping up with 115kBaud serial streams while not doing anything
> else, for example (of course no deep FIFOs).

I think you might be confusing things. The Linux console (/dev/tty1,
/dev/tty2, etc.) isn't a serial device and doesn't require serial drivers or
FIFOs. I believe the console drivers use a memory mapped implementation and
_should be_ able to write characters to the screen at near bus speeds. Of
course, the implementation may not be fully optimized but it should be able
to do a lot better than 115kbps.

A 33Mhz system might have a problem keeping up with a 115kbps serial device
but that's a limitation of the serial hardware. It can handle other kinds of
streams at much higher speeds. I used a 33Mhz 486 with 16MB RAM as my
firewall for many years and it had no trouble keeping up with my 1Mbps DSL,
even using the user space PPPoE implementation. I've also had no trouble
saturating 10Mbps Ethernet using a similarly equipped 486 as an NFS server.

-- 
tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>                                  starnix inc.
647.722.5301                                      toronto, ontario, canada
http://www.starnix.com              professional linux services & products
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