Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 06:25:49 -0500 (CDT) From: <mestery@visi.com> To: rjs@fdy2.demon.co.uk Cc: rdawes@ucsd.edu, wes@softweyr.com, jabley@patho.gen.nz, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 32-bit sparc port Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.10.9907150620530.27817-100000@isis.visi.com> In-Reply-To: <199907150936.EAA02212@mail.visi.com>
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On Thu, 15 Jul 1999, Robert Swindells wrote: > This is the StrongArm system that I bought. It was cheaper than a > Netwinder and can use better graphics cards etc. since it is just > a motherboard. Plus it runs *BSD not Linux. > Yes, it is pretty nice. I had looked at getting one of these over a year ago to prototype some stuff. The StrongARM is a nice chip, but has one drawback. It's cache design is not optimal for multi-tasking Unix systems. It's virtually indexed, so everytime you context switch you have to flush the entire data cache (16K). And this is a terribly slow process, as the way to flush the cache is to read 16K from a cache flush region. With lmbench and a 200MHz SA-110 running Linux, I'm seeing context switch times of approx. 400 microseconds. Ick. Despite all this, the system is stable and runs pretty well. It's currently running a webserver. > I suppose this is getting a bit off-topic for freebsd-sparc. > Agreed. Redirecting to chat.:) -- Kyle Mestery | StorageTek's Storage Networking Group mestery@visi.com | http://www.freebsd.org/ mestery@netwinder.org | http://www.netwinder.org/ Protect your right to privacy: www.freecrypto.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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