Debian on 6850 (very slow)

[Gavin Hamill]

On Tuesday 19 July 2005 08:18, Paul Puschmann wrote:

> http://xfce.uzulabs.net/

> I included the important into the kernel so I don't need an initrd.

Cool - I've never really 'got on' with initrd :)

> The Build was done in about 8min on a PE2850 with two Xeon 2,8GHz, 1GB
> RAM and HT enabled.

Righto, make-kpkg --revision=gdh1 kernel_image executed in a 'fantastic' 11 
minutes and 47 seconds !) I must be doing something /really/ wrong with this 
machine to get that poor performance.

Yes, cat /proc/cpuinfo is showing four physical CPUs :)

It's interesting to note, that only the kernel itself actually launched 
multiple 'cc1' processes - the long module-build section ran sequentially.

I mean, this is a quad Xeon 3.0 with 8M L3 cache (£13k's worth of computer) - 
it should be *fast* :/// I've had this experience with both an i686 kernel 
and 32-bit userspace as well as the em64t kernel + 64-bit userspace... the 
em64t stuff typically runs about 10% faster I've found.

The thing that annoys me the most is that the machine is approx 4 times faster 
than my £250 P4 2.8 Dimension desktop PC... and my desktop has no giant L3 
cache and everything compiled for 386 because I'm lazy and used the 
defaults :)

> The kernel is ready to use for Dell OMSA :-)

Erk :) I'll stick to IPMI for management - just to extract temperatures and 
fan speeds :)

Cheers,
Gavin.