Re: [tlug] Tweaking the kernel

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 07:00:02PM +0900, Dan Lindfield wrote:

>Thanks but I'm now even more confused, I also have a PC using an AMD
>XP1800+ CPU and is loaded with Mandrake 9.1. My understanding is that
>the XP1800 has 128KB of L1 cache and 256KB of L2 cache.

Hmm, good point.  That led me to go looking for documentation of
exactly what /proc/cpuinfo does to get that cache number, but
I have found nothing right.  A read of the kernel source may be
the documentation for that.  I know some people I can ask.

As Tobias mentions, perhaps it's just reporting the larger of
the two cache sizes.  I got the same report on my Athlon
2200+.  It would be nice if it would report either L1,L2 or
a unified total.

This is a good piece on mtrr, although not specific to the
K62:

http://www.penguin.cz/~stano/en/mtrr.html

>Does that mean I'm stuck with what I've got? Is my only option to
>improve speed to cut down on any services running in the background (I'm
>not looking at gaming)?

I don't think the system processes will make much difference to 
performance, although for security reasons you shouldn't run anything
you don't need.

A K62-400 running as a web server could saturate a T3, all it needs
is memory.

Speaking of memory, how much of it do you have?  Insufficient memory
is the biggest single problem with performance on pretty much any
system.  If your notebook has only 32 or 64 meg, bump that to 128
and you'll see a big performance boost.

Are you running KDE or Gnome on it?  If so, chucking that and moving
to a faster, lighter environment would help a lot.  I hear a lot
of good things about IceWM and Fluxbox.  Gnome and KDE both add a
lot of their own overhead.

Recompiling everything optimized for the K62 could help also.  A
large undertaking to be sure, but can help you ring extra peformance
out of it.  If you go this way, moving from Mandrake to Gentoo would
probably be a worthwhile move.

Also, keep in mind that a notebook old enough to have a K62 probably
has a slow disk and lackluster video.  I used to use a Toshiba with
a K62-350 and it was fairly slow, but had 192 meg of memory, so that
kept it moving even when running XP (Linux was not an option b/c
nothing I tried - BSD included - could deal with the spastic cardbus
controller on that machine; only Windows worked, everything else
hung during the install).

Jonathan

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