Fwd: Installing latest hurd
Here is my answer :)
----- Forwarded message from Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@gnu.org> -----
From: Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@gnu.org>
To: Donald Allen <donaldcallen@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Installing latest hurd
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 00:19:09 +0200
Hello,
Again, as the delay for my answer shows, it'd really be better to raise
the issues on the mailing lists, to improve the chances that you get an
answer in a timely fashion.
Donald Allen, le Sun 25 Aug 2013 10:27:17 -0400, a écrit :
> My point is that it looks like the filesystem performance is very
> poor.
For such kind of very heavy data transfers, yes. Nobody ever had a look
at optimizing that kind of scenario, so it's not surprising that it is
slow.
> Is there a buffer cache?
There is only a page cache.
Note that currently memory flush is done per-page. Some work has been
done on multi-page memory flush, but it is not merged yet.
> The disk driver could also be an issue, depending on how it treats the
> disk cache.
It is relatively poor, as it always performs a copy. But that's not what
kills the performance. Multi-page memory flush is what we really miss.
> My first priority was a web browser. I installed iceweasel, which
> would not start. I got an error that talked about threads
Yes, this is a new one. Apparently iceweasel itself does not use threads
any more, and only loads libpthread through some plugin, which is not
supported by our libpthread (it is very hard to unexpectedly switch from
mono-thread to multi-thread). This can be worked around through using
export LD_PRELOAD=/lib/i386-gnu/libpthread.so.0.3
> I then tried installing midori,
> which did come up, but could not display any web pages, claiming it
> could not find the sites. Yes, I had entered the addresses of
> comcast's dns servers in /etc/resolv.conf and verified that dns was
> working by pinging a couple of sites.
Did you try wget?
> And again, anything I did, e.g., starting X and the window manager,
> starting midori, was painfully slow.
On native hardware? I'm not getting such kind of slowness, even if I'm
using the vesa driver since my graphic card is an intel, whose drivers
requires drm.
> I would like to help with this -- performance analysis and improvement
> was a specialty of mine for many years
It'd probably be useful to track down where your particular performance
issue lies in.
Samuel
----- End forwarded message -----
Reply to: