From owner-freebsd-hardware Wed Sep 18 00:56:34 1996 Return-Path: owner-hardware Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id AAA19945 for hardware-outgoing; Wed, 18 Sep 1996 00:56:34 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sdev.blaze.net.au (sdev.blaze.net.au [203.17.53.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id AAA19206; Wed, 18 Sep 1996 00:55:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (davidn@localhost) by sdev.blaze.net.au (8.7.5/8.6.9) with SMTP id RAA05069; Wed, 18 Sep 1996 17:48:57 GMT Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 17:48:55 +0000 () From: David Nugent To: Bruce Evans cc: craigs@os.com, jab@rock.anchorage.net, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Slow Etherlink In-Reply-To: <199609170456.OAA10729@godzilla.zeta.org.au> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hardware@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Tue, 17 Sep 1996, Bruce Evans wrote: >>One thing I will say about Linux is that it has superior screen display >>performance. So, if what you are complaining about is screen redraw >>speed, Linux is much faster than FreeBSD. > >Really? Linux was 6-12 times slower last time I worked on speeding up >syscons. I can only agree to this. I recently switched from RedHat Linux (running kernel 2.0.10) to FreeBSD on exactly the same hardware, and without having benchmarks at all I'd rate syscons quite noticably faster than Linux's console. When the scree scrolls, for example, I often missed screens of output in the blink of an eye (I'd rarely even see them scroll by!), whereas on Linux I'd have the opportunity to hit ^S to stop the display. Well, at least I learned to use more, more (and more - sic! :-)). One problem I do have with the syscons driver, however, is the cursor. I'm not one who things much of the blocky cursor, especially since porting Crisp as an editor with it's neat ability to change the cursor size over virtual/real spaces - it needs to have the hardware cursor enabled (e.g. vidcontrol -c destructive) so the cursor size can change. The problem is, the screen updates are affected by enabling that, such that when typing at the shell prompt, you often don't see characters that are typed until you hit enter. Is this a known problem? I'm running 2.2-CURRENT if that is relevent, although I noticed the same when I ran 2.1.5-RELEASE as well. Right now I just have the editor enable the destructive cursor while editing, and switch it back off when exiting via the appropriate ANSI sequences. Unfortunately, while that's fine while within that vt (Crisp itself seems unaffected by this 'bug' - it seems only to happen with cooked stdio enabled, or maybe if termios echo enabled since it occurs with tcsh as well; I haven't really experimented all that much) - but the destructive cursor is system wide, so switching to another vt while editing brings the destructive cursor with it. David Nugent, Unique Computing Pty Ltd - Melbourne, Australia Voice +61-3-791-9547 Data/BBS +61-3-792-3507 3:632/348@fidonet davidn@blaze.net.au http://www.blaze.net.au/~davidn