Very Computer

Hi. Has anyone had success with linux on a Leading Edge computer? The
one I'm thinking of is a model #2700   486/66 with 4MB ram with no cashe
memory. Successes, failures, problems welcome.

lovitlovitsince0.99pl15
Linux, the internet, libraries and fire departments are good.

: DON'T BUY A MACHINE WITH NO CACHE! ESPECIALLY FOR USE WITH LINUX!
: IT WILL KILL YOUR PERFORMANCE!!!!!
Hi,
sorry about that, but I'm running an old 385/25 with NO CACHE
and 8 MB and it works just fine. Much faster than it
has ever been under DOS/MS Windows.
But of course, 4 MB isn't enough for running X at a sufficient speed.
On the other hand 8 MB fit all my needs and are enough to have about
3 applications (one big and two smaller) running at a good speed.
Bye, Ruediger

Froh

P.S.: Just check out your dealer isn't selling a normal board to you, just
without cache RAMS.

--
Frohwalt Egerer   Drausnickstr. 36   91052 Erlangen   Germany      ///   Use


                                                               \XX/  ECG 210
That's what I like about Windows ... it's reliable ... I can rely on it
to hang least once a day or more.             -- Dan A. Newcombe

: LE WinPros have cache capability but don't have cache RAM installed.  I have
: one here and it runs Slackware fine.  As has been noted theoretically, the
: lack of a cache doesn't really affect things while it's running Linux...
: however, the boot-time self-unzip is noticeably slower.

I don't know how you could possibly say that.  I've seen three machines
without cache and their Linux performance drops a lot.  One was an
expensive Mylex motherboard designed for UNIX systems and cache
certainly helped it.

If you add cache to your motherboard, it will run faster almost without
fail.  I've yet to see one faster when you removed it's cache.  All of
them lost speed that I've seen and not just during boot.  All the time.

Some exceptions are if you have 8 megs or less RAM going from 128K to
256K won't help nearly as much as adding cache in the first place.  But
if you go over 8 megs of RAM without adding cache most systems will take
a noticeably performance hit.

Most UNIX workstations are packing 1 meg or more cache these days.

I know at school we have a VME-machine with an MC68020 that doesn't have
cache RAM.  It has interleaved memory and 60ns RAM too.  However, newer
ones use cache and are faster with UNIX or OS/9.

A 40mHz 486 requires faster than 60ns RAM for fastest access time.
Adding cache RAM on a motherboard with good coherency between the 486's
cache and the external cache will allow 80ns RAM to deliver the same
performance, though I use 70ns in mine.

Going from 128K to 256K in my machine was noticeable all around when I
had 8megs of RAM.  I've 20megs now and going back to 128K cache RAM
causes my system to drop around 20% in speed for some tasks.  I
imagine DOS might not have noticed but I don't have it anymore so
I can't say.

: ++Brandon
: --

: The FUDs at Microsoft are shouting "Kill The Wabi!"
--
csh
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I'm running Linux on a Winpro 486e (486DX/33) w/8MB RAM.  The system runs
better now then it ever did under DOS/Windows.

My next experiment is to get the DOSemu working so I can kill my DOS
partion all together. :)

Good luck!

Dave

: LE WinPros have cache capability but don't have cache RAM installed.  I have
: one here and it runs Slackware fine.  As has been noted theoretically, the
: lack of a cache doesn't really affect things while it's running Linux...
: however, the boot-time self-unzip is noticeably slower.

This would seem to imply that Linux and/or mainstream clone chipsets
have caching problems.  I have worked with a realtime unix clone OS
on Intel boxes that allowed turning caching off on the fly.  Performance
would degrade noticeably when the cache was turned off.

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