Re: Debian install for beginners?

[Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>]

Simon Hepburn <sth@blueyonder.co.uk> writes:

> Brian Nelson wrote:
> 
> > Simon Hepburn <sth@blueyonder.co.uk> writes:
> > > Brian Nelson wrote:
> > > > Those old (FX chipset?) motherboards only have a cacheable area of
> > > > 64MB, so using more than 64MB can actually reduce performance, though I
> > > > think this effect would be less significant on Linux.
> > >
> > > That would be the TX chipset. I dont think that the FX,VX Chipsets had
> > > this limitation.
> >
> > All the triton boards except the HX had a cacheable limit of 64MB.
> 
> The problem with these chipsets in their day was that linux 2.2 had pretty 
> simple memory management - it just loaded as high as possible, regardless of 
> whether the memory was cacheable or not. Does anyone know what the state of 
> play is with 2.4 ? Is the memory management smart enough to always use cached 
> ram in preference to uncached ram?

Actually, it was closer to the 1.2 and 2.0 era kernels.  IIRC, Win9x had
the largest performance degradations when using more than 64MB ram (10-20%).
The degradation on Winnt and Linux was less pronounced (5-10%).  I'm not
sure how 2.2 or 2.4 kernels would compare.

-- 
Brian Nelson <nelson@bignachos.com>