Re: Firewire/USB Card for Qube 2

On Jun 6, 2008, at 7:43 AM, Izumi Tsutsui wrote:

>> Puzzling, isn't it? And I do not have time (or
>> knowledge) to track the things down the chain for this
>> slowdown.
>
> First, Qube2 is much slower than modern x86 machines, and
> only "overmuscled" CPUs can saturate 100BaseTX network back in 1999.
> For example, the Tulip Ethernet chip can't transfer receive packets
> into unaligned DMA buffer and kernel has to copy all RX packets
> from DMA buffer to mbufs.
>
> Second, implementation of network stack is too complicated and
> we can't see which part (CPU, devices, drivers, VM, protocol layer,
> checksumming, etc. etc) has bottleneck without proper benchmarks.
>
> I agree current NetBSD/mips implementation is not so optimized
> for MIPS3 CPUS, though.

I would recommend performing the same test with the last official  
Qube2 software release (still available on the Sun web site).  That  
should be the performance benchmark, and it is as easy to set up as  
our restore disks.  Perhaps easier, actually, given the web interface.

Byron