From owner-freebsd-current Sun Nov 10 11:26:11 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id LAA27148 for current-outgoing; Sun, 10 Nov 1996 11:26:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from dyson.iquest.net ([198.70.144.127]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id LAA27140 for ; Sun, 10 Nov 1996 11:26:07 -0800 (PST) Received: (from root@localhost) by dyson.iquest.net (8.8.2/8.6.9) id OAA06336 for current@freebsd.org; Sun, 10 Nov 1996 14:26:06 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" Message-Id: <199611101926.OAA06336@dyson.iquest.net> Subject: Bad news: kind-of about page coloring To: current@freebsd.org Date: Sun, 10 Nov 1996 14:26:05 -0500 (EST) Reply-To: dyson@freebsd.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-current@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk As some of you know, I just got a PP motherboard (mostly to be able to work on SMP in the near future.) For now, I just have one processor, and have been studying it (in relation to FreeBSD.) As I kind-of expected due to the 4 way 2nd level cache on the PP, the page coloring code appears to be more of a hinderance than an advantage. I did find a significant improvement on the Pentium though. Just to let you know, I am going to make the coloring code work by setting itself up at runtime as opposed to compile time. The coloring code does have a liability of messing up our page caching stats (a little bit), but since the the PP cache is 4 way associative, we don't need the coloring nearly as much. So, IMO, coloring appears to be generally bad on the PPro. John