Ubuntu Performance Question

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007 at 02:26:01PM -0400, lada-h8kxHjy+vg4AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> The disk speed never concerned me. What I find strange is that on
> completely idle P4 machine top reports using 3% of CPU time itself. On idle
> P3 machime top comsumes 0.3% of CPU time. I suspected some motherboard
> misconfiguration since the P4 box was slow during the Ubuntu installation
> (I had to wait ~30s when proceeding to each next installation screen). Both
> L1 and L2 caches are enabled. What is a bit suspicious is lshw reporting
> about the motherboard:
> 
>           capabilities: isa pci pnp apm upgrade shadowing escd cdboot
> bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy1200 int13floppy720
>  int13floppy2880 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer
> int10video acpi usb agp ls120boot zipboot biosbootspecif
> ication 
> 
> The first item is isa - there are no ISA slots on the board. However, later
> in the lshw report:
> 
>         *-isa UNCLAIMED 
>              description: ISA bridge
>              product: 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) LPC Interface Bridge
>              vendor: Intel Corporation
>              physical id: 1f 
>              bus info: pci at 00:1f.0
>              version: 02
>              width: 32 bits
>              clock: 33MHz
>              capabilities: isa bus_master 
> 
> The P3 box lshw report does not list isa in the board capabilities. That is
> the only difference I can see.

LPC is software compatible with ISA although very different in hardware.
Generally this is where hardware monitor chios, the BIOS, and a few
other things are connected.  Even your serial/parallel ports are still
connected through a virtual isa/lpc bus even though they are inside the
chipset.  Just leaves things compatible with what software expects.

As for why the P3 doesn't list such things, well maybe it doesn't have
whatever interface lshw uses to determine such things.  Looks like is
uses DMI for that, which older machines often didn't have or had pretty
minimal information in.

--
Len Sorensen
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