Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 18:47:43 +1000 (EST) From: michael butler <imb@asstdc.com.au> To: stable@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org Cc: imb@scgt.oz.au Subject: RISCom/8 driver + NFS - experiences in Montreal Message-ID: <199607090847.SAA03375@walkabout.asstdc.com.au>
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Just following up on some of the experiences from this year's ISOC developing country workshops in Montreal .. i) The RISCom/8 driver worked fine off the 2.1R CD but, when the kernel was upgraded to -stable, the kernel complained (lots!) about the mass depletion and subsequent non-availability of clists. This rendered it unusable for coursework. Unfortunately, I couldn't spend long enough to identify the actual cause of the problem (spl changes inviting race condition ?) in the 5 or so days available. ii) The upgrade to -stable was necessitated by a show-stopper in 2.1R's NFS and, even then, some serious performance problems persisted. Initially, we tried to load 30 machines concurrently over NFS (bootp then "tar xvf") and, despite a useful patch from Paul Traina, it was never actually possible to keep the ethernet saturated .. everything would back off .. long timeouts and a couple of very long nights :-(. Reducing the number of concurrent loads to the student machines helped slightly but did not cure the problem (nor did installing ether switches instead of hubs). Switching to NFS over TCP didn't help or reducing the read and write sizes to 1kb. The machine from which the loads were done was dual-homed for logistic reasons if that holds any clues. Also required for the classes (and now in -stable) was the multicast support for the 3C509 (thanks for the timing on this one!) .. OSPF with gated was taught in place of RIP (although it was mentioned in the context of "you don't want to do this" :-)). This could not have been done on 2.1R. Some "idiosyncracies" with gated were noted and taken on-board by the maintainers. Next year, it seems that we can dispense with BSDI totally now that John Hay's N2 driver is into -current and will hopefully propagate into the main distribution before next year. Overall, from my perspective, the whole exercise was successful and both students and instructors alike learned _lots_ from the experience .. Whilst only being a humble instructor, I'd also like to thank Jordon and his organisation publicly for their support in ensuring that each student (99 countries were represented amongst them) took home a FreeBSD CD. I'd like to use it again next year and have suggested so on the workshop admin list, Many, many thanks, michael
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