[gentoo-user] [smp related] 2.6.13 is 10x slower than 2.6.12!

[Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au>]

Not long ago, I griped about 2.6.13 being _very_ slow to boot and run.
My original email is at the bottom.

I've since recompiled the kernel without SMP and Hyperthreading, and the
system is _much_ faster.

So, there is a problem with 2.6.13 and SMP or Hyperthreaded machines.
Can anyone else confirm this?  What should I do?  Is there a kernel.org
bugzilla?  Or perhaps I should put it in the gentoo bugzilla?

Any pointers would be appreciated...

thanks.

On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 12:11 +0930, Iain Buchanan wrote:
> I just compiled 2.6.13-gentoo-r2 with mostly the same options as
> 2.6.12-gentoo-r7 (my reference point).  The first time I booted, it took
> about 10-15 minutes on my 3GHz P4 laptop!  I watched the gdm background
> slowly display over about 30 seconds.
> 
> I thought it might have something to do with the new default timer
> frequency, which I set to 250Hz instead of 1000Hz (which is the default
> for pre 2.6.13 kernels).  According to various online sites, 250Hz
> should still be just as usable, and may even use less power, increasing
> my battery performance...
> 
> So I changed the timer frequency back to 1000Hz, recompiled and now it
> seems a little faster, but no where near 2.6.12.  It now boots in maybe
> 5 minutes, and the gdm theme takes about 5s to display.
> 
> glxgears (not maximised) gives me about 30 fps with a radeon 9700!
> 
> I checked the frequency governor, and the default is still
> 'performance'.  /proc/acpi/processor/CPU0/throttling shows the maximum
> frequency is active as per normal.
> 
> Other kernel options I changed are:
> - support for software suspend added (could this be it? I definitely saw
> the message that no valid suspend was found in my swapfile,
> and /proc/swaps shows that I have swap enabled as per usual)
> - removed unnecessary SCSI drivers (I don't have anything SCSI)
> - removed SATA support (I definitely don't have SATA)
> 
> Info:
> Dell Ispiron 9100, 3 GHz HT Pentium 4
> 2.6.12 and 2.6.13: SMP support for 2 processors included
> 
> I've seen 1 post online about the same thing - slow running 2.6.13, so
> surely there must be some people in the world running it ok!  Any help
> on this would be appreciated.
> 
> TIA,

-- 
Iain Buchanan <iaindb@netspace.net.au>

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