Experiences with Debian Lasat/Eicon Masquerade PRO
Hi,
I have a Masquerade PRO with the latest kernel from Eicon (2.4.17, 020117).
Network installation of Debian went fairly well, after copying the installation
root image to a partition on the harddisk. There were a few glitches but the
base system was installed on an ext3 system and I was able to continue from
there after reboot, using apt and dselect.
I've noticed that the disk performance is less than perfect and suspect this to
be caused by something in the kernel, possibly interrupt management. For small
acceses it's pretty fast, but when doing intensive access the performance drops
quite low (like 2-3MB/sec), and the whole system seems to become laggy. Also
under these periods of heavy disk access I notice PCI arbitration errors on the
Ethernet devices (meaning they are not granted access to the PCI bus fast
enough). It could be some congestion on the PCI related to some settings of the
system controller.
Eicon is no longer developing for the Masquerade boards (they still use another
board without harddisk for some of their products), so I suspect that they will
not do any work on the harddisk support, but before I start hacking away at the
kernel myself I just wanted to check if any of you have had experience or any
solutions to this problem.
PS: I would like to start porting some of the unported Debian packages to this
platform, eg. VNC.
PPS: If you would like access to my Masquerade PRO for some reasonable
reason :) (like porting packages), - please drop me a mail. I can't promise a
100% uptime, but should be close.
Best regards,
Thomas Horsten
Thomas@Horsten.com
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