Got in a little over my head with some non mainstream distros. Like Beehive (maybe fastest distro around) www.beehive.nu

Came back to Mdk 8.1 and went with an expert install instead of the default for dummies. Formatted it ext3 instead of ext2(default) seems to be somewhat faster than before. Is this tpossible or is my mind just mushy after screwing with approx 5 or 6 distros over the past 2 days?

The Peanut was fast, but I could not get my graphics card up right. Could not find drivers for Mach 64 Rage II

Yes, ext3 is ext2 with metadata journaling and ordered data writes, also provides data journaling as well, so it will seem faster becuase it IS. If you want to quickest filesystem, then XFS is the best but currently Gentoo is one of the few that supports it. Its like ext3 but you can set the amount of allocation groups and the journalling size with the mount command under gentoo (i dont know about other distro's).

Peanut uses XFree 4.2.0 be default....some gfx cards STILL weren't ported over to 4.2.0 but were still there in 4.1.0 and earlier. Solution is to compile a new xfree86 with older revision.

Nothing is quite going to speed up your system more than either a) gutting the useless goop, which you probably did quite a bit of with an expert Mandrake install, and b) putting an append line into your boot loader's .conf file. Every Linux distro defaults to idebus=33, If your HD can do 66 or a 100, which all of them have for the past 4 years, its probably a good move to crank that. Journalling filesystems are faster, but we're talking seek read times of 1-2 ms quicker compared to asynchronous ext2. If you triple the idebus and your machine holds, then you might see it drop by half. To see how fast you're yanking data, try:

hdparm -t /dev/harddrive

and then compare it to the 6 pages worth of replies Jeremy asked for here..

Cheers,

Finegan

P.S. The only mainstream distros that aren't really suffering from the bloat are Debian and Slackware, who for opposite reasons are a few generations back on kernels, Xfrees, and a few other packages. They're also dead stable. I've got Slack 8 running on that card on a P1 200, no problems.

I think my hdds are running ATA/33 (becuase i dont know how to set grub up for ATA/100 it dont say on the Gentoo site) but my scores rock..here it goes:



bash-2.05a# hdparm -t /dev/hda5 <--- XFS Drive (maxtor in sig)

/dev/hda5:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.10 seconds = 30.48 MB/sec
bash-2.05a#

Here is the reading for my Second drive using NTFS btw this is a ATA/66 drive.



/dev/hdb:
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.68 seconds = 23.88 MB/sec
bash-2.05a#

To check the current idebus speed, look in 'dmesg', it should be right after the ide initialization, but if you aven't tweaked it, its 33. I don't know grub so I can't help you, but adding an append line has to be in some recent how-to's especially with the AMD+AGP pseudo-bug. For instance, these two are taking advantage of idebus=66 and are crappy old 5400 rpm drives:

Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 3.15 seconds = 20.32 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.61 seconds = 24.56 MB/sec

Cheers,

Finegan

ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx

Oops.

Read alittle further and i got this:

VP_IDE: VIA vt8233 (rev 00) IDE UDMA100 controller on pci00:11.1
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xdc00-0xdc07, BIOS settings: hdaMA, hdbMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xdc08-0xdc0f, BIOS settings: hdcMA, hddMA

So i guess all i have to do is change the grub config file.

then i stumple upon this:

hda: 60030432 sectors (30736 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=3736/255/63, UDMA(100)
hdb: 30043440 sectors (15382 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=1870/255/63, UDMA(66)


I take it this is just the hard disk information right?

Ok here is the catch: i have it saying i have a KT133 chipset!!!

i added the line to the grub file and rebooted and it still works in ATA./33 mode.

Hmmm, dunno why. Again, I don't do grub, so you might have to do some poking around there. Yeah, those UDMA=100 and UDMA=66 lines are coming off of the hard drive ID'ing itself.

Cheers,

Finegan

ok thanks for pointing this out, i might be loosing performance becuase of it. I am asking gentoo users list now...

Could someone please tell me how to change this setting that you are talking about?

Which one? the Xfer mode of the hard drive?

Yes. From 33 to 66 or 100

open up a terminal:

hdparm -X 66 /dev/hdxx <-- for ATA/66 mode
hdparm -X 69 /dev/hdxx <-- for ATA/100 mode