What to do with slow Chip/ST RAM
David Brownlee <[email protected]> Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:48:03 +0000 (GMT)
| Newsgroups | gmane.os.netbsd.ports.atari,gmane.os.netbsd.ports.amiga |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <alpine.NEB.2.00.0903111240440.8415@localhost> |
Both amiga and atari have the concept of 'fast' and 'slow' RAM. For a system with a reasonable amount of fast RAM using the slow RAM can actually slow things down, though it seems like a shame to waste it... Jared has written a driver for the sgimips O2 to allow it to access some of its extra memory banks as a block device, which means it can use it as a RAM swap device. (The issue with the O2 is different, as the current NetBSD kernel cannot use that extra memory directly, but the principle is related). Would anyone be interested in adding support to use chip/ST RAM on the amiga/atari in a similar fashion (obviously some of it is likely to be reserved for device DMA). Would be bery interesting to see a benchmark before/after :) Jared's latest patch for an MI altmem device are at: http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/jmcneill/altmem/ and his original posting is at: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-sgimips/2009/03/09/msg000479.html -- David/absolute -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --