Performance on "modern" x86 hardware?

[Robert_Agustin]

Has anyone done testing of QNX 6.1.0 for x86 on current PC hardware?
I’ve been seeing some pretty strange compilation time results for
compiling our same project source code on different processors. Here’s
a rough sample of what I’m seeing:

Dell 650Mhz PIII Laptop - ~45 minutes to compile source tree
Dell 1.4Ghz P4 Desktop - 3 hours
Sager 1 Ghz PIII Laptop - ~1 hour
AMD AthlonXP 1800 w/Adaptec 2940UW, UW SCSI drives - ~50 minutes

It would seem to me that the last three configurations should run faster
for compile time (as well as in other areas) than the 650 Mhz PIII
laptop… Has anyone else seen anything like this?

Thanks,
Robert

[David_Rempel]

I would guess that bottle neck is the filesystem. The P4 might
be using a DMA controller that’s not supported in 6.1, where as the P3’s
are using controllers where DMA does work. Again just a guess, the
hardware support guy could probably tell you for sure.


Robert Agustin <agustin@apicom.com> wrote:

Has anyone done testing of QNX 6.1.0 for x86 on current PC hardware?
I’ve been seeing some pretty strange compilation time results for
compiling our same project source code on different processors. Here’s
a rough sample of what I’m seeing:

Dell 650Mhz PIII Laptop - ~45 minutes to compile source tree
Dell 1.4Ghz P4 Desktop - 3 hours
Sager 1 Ghz PIII Laptop - ~1 hour
AMD AthlonXP 1800 w/Adaptec 2940UW, UW SCSI drives - ~50 minutes

It would seem to me that the last three configurations should run faster
for compile time (as well as in other areas) than the 650 Mhz PIII
laptop… Has anyone else seen anything like this?

Thanks,
Robert

[Mario_Charest1]

“Robert Agustin” <agustin@apicom.com> wrote in message
news:3CA36A40.7000000@apicom.com…

Has anyone done testing of QNX 6.1.0 for x86 on current PC hardware?
I’ve been seeing some pretty strange compilation time results for
compiling our same project source code on different processors. Here’s
a rough sample of what I’m seeing:

Dell 650Mhz PIII Laptop - ~45 minutes to compile source tree
Dell 1.4Ghz P4 Desktop - 3 hours
Sager 1 Ghz PIII Laptop - ~1 hour

P4 1.4Ghz will be slower then a P3 1Ghz…( but not by that much)

AMD AthlonXP 1800 w/Adaptec 2940UW, UW SCSI drives - ~50 minutes

I beleive SCSI support in 6.1 kind of sucks

As David mentionned most probably a HD driver issue.


Check CPU usage, if’s it’s not 100% all the time that’s because it’s
starving for data from the HD.

It would seem to me that the last three configurations should run faster
for compile time (as well as in other areas) than the 650 Mhz PIII
laptop… Has anyone else seen anything like this?

Thanks,
Robert

[Robert_Agustin]

Thanks for the insight

Since SCSI support seems to suck in 6.1, has any of you guys had any
good luck with a particular IDE controller? I know on the QNX website
they say “compatible” for all IDE controllers, but compatible doesn’t
necessarily mean optimized (like the P4 desktop that I tried).

I don’t know what’s in the PIII 650Mhz laptop, but that IDE controller
chip seems to be well-supported. At least compiling goes really, really
fast compared to all the other machines. It’s a Dell Latitude if
that gives anyone a clue.

Thanks a bunch Mario and David – This is more information than I’ve
been able to dig up myself with search engines for the past two days!

-Robert


Mario Charest wrote:

“Robert Agustin” <> agustin@apicom.com> > wrote in message
news:> 3CA36A40.7000000@apicom.com> …

Has anyone done testing of QNX 6.1.0 for x86 on current PC hardware?
I’ve been seeing some pretty strange compilation time results for
compiling our same project source code on different processors. Here’s
a rough sample of what I’m seeing:

Dell 650Mhz PIII Laptop - ~45 minutes to compile source tree
Dell 1.4Ghz P4 Desktop - 3 hours
Sager 1 Ghz PIII Laptop - ~1 hour


P4 1.4Ghz will be slower then a P3 1Ghz…( but not by that much)


AMD AthlonXP 1800 w/Adaptec 2940UW, UW SCSI drives - ~50 minutes



I beleive SCSI support in 6.1 kind of sucks >

As David mentionned most probably a HD driver issue.


Check CPU usage, if’s it’s not 100% all the time that’s because it’s
starving for data from the HD.


It would seem to me that the last three configurations should run faster
for compile time (as well as in other areas) than the 650 Mhz PIII
laptop… Has anyone else seen anything like this?

Thanks,
Robert
\

[Mario_Charest1]

“Robert Agustin” <agustin@apicom.com> wrote in message
news:3CA3A6FF.6000304@apicom.com…

Thanks for the insight >

Since SCSI support seems to suck in 6.1, has any of you guys had any
good luck with a particular IDE controller? I know on the QNX website
they say “compatible” for all IDE controllers, but compatible doesn’t
necessarily mean optimized (like the P4 desktop that I tried).

I don’t know what’s in the PIII 650Mhz laptop, but that IDE controller
chip seems to be well-supported. At least compiling goes really, really
fast compared to all the other machines. > > It’s a Dell Latitude if
that gives anyone a clue.

Well it’s not only the hardware that’s important, it’s also the BIOS.
From what Igor discovered it depends how the BIOS programmed
the controller. Apparently QNX isn’t turning all the feature on, but if
they
are turned on by the BIOS it may speed things up.

As you see things are a bit complicated

This won’t help in the short term but 6.2 should greatlty improve the
situation;
for IDE at least, don’t know about SCSI

Apply for the beta at
http://www.qnx.com/testdrive/index.qnx?accept=agreement#agreement

Thanks a bunch Mario and David – This is more information than I’ve
been able to dig up myself with search engines for the past two days!

My pleasure.

-Robert


Mario Charest wrote:
“Robert Agustin” <> agustin@apicom.com> > wrote in message
news:> 3CA36A40.7000000@apicom.com> …

Has anyone done testing of QNX 6.1.0 for x86 on current PC hardware?
I’ve been seeing some pretty strange compilation time results for
compiling our same project source code on different processors. Here’s
a rough sample of what I’m seeing:

Dell 650Mhz PIII Laptop - ~45 minutes to compile source tree
Dell 1.4Ghz P4 Desktop - 3 hours
Sager 1 Ghz PIII Laptop - ~1 hour


P4 1.4Ghz will be slower then a P3 1Ghz…( but not by that much)


AMD AthlonXP 1800 w/Adaptec 2940UW, UW SCSI drives - ~50 minutes



I beleive SCSI support in 6.1 kind of sucks >

As David mentionned most probably a HD driver issue.


Check CPU usage, if’s it’s not 100% all the time that’s because it’s
starving for data from the HD.


It would seem to me that the last three configurations should run faster
for compile time (as well as in other areas) than the 650 Mhz PIII
laptop… Has anyone else seen anything like this?

Thanks,
Robert


\

[Robert_Agustin]

Mario Charest wrote:

“Robert Agustin” <> agustin@apicom.com> > wrote in message
news:> 3CA3A6FF.6000304@apicom.com> …

Thanks for the insight >

Since SCSI support seems to suck in 6.1, has any of you guys had any
good luck with a particular IDE controller? I know on the QNX website
they say “compatible” for all IDE controllers, but compatible doesn’t
necessarily mean optimized (like the P4 desktop that I tried).

I don’t know what’s in the PIII 650Mhz laptop, but that IDE controller
chip seems to be well-supported. At least compiling goes really, really
fast compared to all the other machines. > > It’s a Dell Latitude if
that gives anyone a clue.



Well it’s not only the hardware that’s important, it’s also the BIOS.
From what Igor discovered it depends how the BIOS programmed
the controller. Apparently QNX isn’t turning all the feature on, but if
they
are turned on by the BIOS it may speed things up.

As you see things are a bit complicated >

This won’t help in the short term but 6.2 should greatlty improve the
situation;
for IDE at least, don’t know about SCSI

Apply for the beta at
http://www.qnx.com/testdrive/index.qnx?accept=agreement#agreement

[rest ommitted]


Yup, I did get to read Igor’s post about filesystem speed and
miscellaneous comments on bios. (BTW, I did flash my SCSI controller
bios and got a bit of a speed boost)

Let me ask the question slightly differently…

From a practical standpoint, has anyone discovered a specific
motherboard/disk controller configuration that works well
filesystem-speed-wise for QNX that uses PIII, P4, or Athlon XP/MP
processors? I think I have one in that Dell laptop that I have, but the
processor is the bottleneck in that machine and it’s a bit hard to
upgrade a laptop’s processor…

-Robert

[Mario_Charest1]

[rest ommitted]


Yup, I did get to read Igor’s post about filesystem speed and
miscellaneous comments on bios. (BTW, I did flash my SCSI controller
bios and got a bit of a speed boost)

Let me ask the question slightly differently… >

From a practical standpoint, has anyone discovered a specific
motherboard/disk controller configuration that works well
filesystem-speed-wise for QNX that uses PIII, P4, or Athlon XP/MP
processors? I think I have one in that Dell laptop that I have, but the
processor is the bottleneck in that machine and it’s a bit hard to
upgrade a laptop’s processor… >

Sorry but all the motherboad I have are “obsolete”

You could use your laptop as a file server and get the other
machines to compile

-Robert

[Mario_Charest1]

Let me ask the question slightly differently… >

From a practical standpoint, has anyone discovered a specific
motherboard/disk controller configuration that works well
filesystem-speed-wise for QNX that uses PIII, P4, or Athlon XP/MP
processors? I think I have one in that Dell laptop that I have, but the
processor is the bottleneck in that machine and it’s a bit hard to
upgrade a laptop’s processor… >

Just a suggestion (serious one this time) until you find the right hardware:

I personnaly have increase the filesystem cache to 100Meg, and use
commit=none
and delwri=60. I haven’t timed compilation but it’s definately feels
faster.
Note that commit=none and delwri=60 make the filesystem unreliable in case
of
power failure (you could loose the last 60 seconds of work).

I feel the 100M cache is big and may actually add some extra work
for devb-eide, but since I’m on a SMP machine I think I’m ok.

-Robert

[Robert_Agustin]

Mario Charest wrote:

Let me ask the question slightly differently… >

From a practical standpoint, has anyone discovered a specific
motherboard/disk controller configuration that works well
filesystem-speed-wise for QNX that uses PIII, P4, or Athlon XP/MP
processors? I think I have one in that Dell laptop that I have, but the
processor is the bottleneck in that machine and it’s a bit hard to
upgrade a laptop’s processor… >


Just a suggestion (serious one this time) until you find the right hardware:

I personnaly have increase the filesystem cache to 100Meg, and use
commit=none
and delwri=60. I haven’t timed compilation but it’s definately feels
faster.
Note that commit=none and delwri=60 make the filesystem unreliable in case
of
power failure (you could loose the last 60 seconds of work).

I feel the 100M cache is big and may actually add some extra work
for devb-eide, but since I’m on a SMP machine I think I’m ok.

Looks like those changes made the filesystem perform about twice as slow
as before with respect to compiles. I tried doing this on the 1Ghz PIII
laptop, but haven’t tried it on the other machines I have QNX running
on. I’ll try and play around with that this weekend.

I guess I’ll have to wait for QNX support to get back to me on this one.
So far all they’ve been willing to say is that they “don’t provide any
information as to which hardware is better supported than others”.
Maybe if I ask them the same question differently their support staff
will have more information.

Call me crazy, but I’m figuring that at least some of QNX’s engineers
must have a good idea as to what hardware works pretty well because less
compile time during development == more $$$$ saved.

-Robert

[Mario_Charest1]

I feel the 100M cache is big and may actually add some extra work
for devb-eide, but since I’m on a SMP machine I think I’m ok.



Looks like those changes made the filesystem perform about twice as slow
as before with respect to compiles.

Wow, I’d expect commit and delwri to improve things and not slowing
things down. The cache might be too big though.

Have you try make -j2, that usualy helps.

Sorry I don’t have the answer you are looking for

Call me crazy, but I’m figuring that at least some of QNX’s engineers
must have a good idea as to what hardware works pretty well because less
compile time during development == more $$$$ saved.

Personnaly I’d do the same, recommending hardware is a very very risky
business, things are never quite what they seems to be

They can tell you a motherboard model, you buy it and could very well
get different performance, because of chipset revision, BIOS version etc.

-Robert

[Mario_Charest1]

Another though. You could get the Windows cross development

• Mario

[Robert_Agustin]

Mario Charest wrote:

Another though. You could get the Windows cross development

• Mario

Yup, thought about doing that one, but the initial overhead for doing
that is pretty expensive. Eventually I’d like to use codewarrior for
development, but currently my project is pretty dependent on qnx, unix,
and GNU utilities (not that it’s such a bad thing… )

I think that right now it’s probably best to trudge along with what I
have and wait until I hear anything about which hardware works well with
QNX…

BTW, if anyone’s looking for a decent laptop that runs QNX fairly well,
I’ve had luck with the following model:

Dell Latitude
Model No. PPX
Latitude C Family
Ref number 99125

I believe that it’s a 650Mhz Pentium III based machine. It currently
outruns the 1Ghz Pentium III, 1.4Ghz Penitum 4, and Athlon XP 1800
machines that I had access to by at least 25%.


-Robert

[Robert_Agustin]

Mario Charest wrote:

I feel the 100M cache is big and may actually add some extra work
for devb-eide, but since I’m on a SMP machine I think I’m ok.



Looks like those changes made the filesystem perform about twice as slow
as before with respect to compiles.


Wow, I’d expect commit and delwri to improve things and not slowing
things down. The cache might be too big though.

Have you try make -j2, that usualy helps.

Sorry I don’t have the answer you are looking for >

Thanks for the suggestions thus far though. I really appreciate them.

Call me crazy, but I’m figuring that at least some of QNX’s engineers
must have a good idea as to what hardware works pretty well because less
compile time during development == more $$$$ saved.


Personnaly I’d do the same, recommending hardware is a very very risky
business, things are never quite what they seems to be >

They can tell you a motherboard model, you buy it and could very well
get different performance, because of chipset revision, BIOS version etc.

I don’t understand why they wouldn’t put up a list with a lot of
disclaimers that basically says that they have had pretty good results
with certain components. I’d figure that it would be to their benefit
if they did something like that because it would allow people to
assemble better-performing systems which could support the buisness case
for choosing QNX for projects…

Anyway, I’m starting to get a bit OT now. As I find things that work
well (espeically motherboards and disk controllers), I’ll post that
information to this forum.

Here’s details on the AMD machine that I tried:

Soyo K7 Dragon (don’t know bios revision, can dig up later)
AMD Athlon XP 1800
512MB DDR-SDRAM
Adaptec 2940UW (bios v2.57.2)
9GB UW scsi drive
Creative GeForce2 GTS video card
Lynksys PCI ethernet card

• Tested QNX v6.1.0
• everything seems to work (did default installation)
• hard drive access is fairly slow
  (especially for compiling source code)
• have not tried on-board IDE controller yet
• have not tried on-board sound
• video card 2D works well
• have not tried to test video card 3D
• ethernet card works well
  
  
  -Robert

[Robert_Agustin]

Robert Agustin wrote:

Mario Charest wrote:

I feel the 100M cache is big and may actually add some extra work
for devb-eide, but since I’m on a SMP machine I think I’m ok.



Looks like those changes made the filesystem perform about twice as slow
as before with respect to compiles.



Wow, I’d expect commit and delwri to improve things and not slowing
things down. The cache might be too big though.

Have you try make -j2, that usualy helps.

Sorry I don’t have the answer you are looking for >



Thanks for the suggestions thus far though. I really appreciate them. >



Call me crazy, but I’m figuring that at least some of QNX’s engineers
must have a good idea as to what hardware works pretty well because less
compile time during development == more $$$$ saved.



Personnaly I’d do the same, recommending hardware is a very very risky
business, things are never quite what they seems to be >

They can tell you a motherboard model, you buy it and could very well
get different performance, because of chipset revision, BIOS version etc.


I don’t understand why they wouldn’t put up a list with a lot of
disclaimers that basically says that they have had pretty good results
with certain components. I’d figure that it would be to their benefit
if they did something like that because it would allow people to
assemble better-performing systems which could support the buisness case
for choosing QNX for projects…

Anyway, I’m starting to get a bit OT now. As I find things that work
well (espeically motherboards and disk controllers), I’ll post that
information to this forum.

Here’s details on the AMD machine that I tried:

Soyo K7 Dragon (don’t know bios revision, can dig up later)
AMD Athlon XP 1800
512MB DDR-SDRAM
Adaptec 2940UW (bios v2.57.2)
9GB UW scsi drive
Creative GeForce2 GTS video card
Lynksys PCI ethernet card

• Tested QNX v6.1.0
• everything seems to work (did default installation)
• hard drive access is fairly slow
  (especially for compiling source code)
• have not tried on-board IDE controller yet
• have not tried on-board sound
• video card 2D works well
• have not tried to test video card 3D
• ethernet card works well
  
  
  -Robert

Oops, the moterboard is really a “Soyo K7 Dragon Plus!” (Via KT266A
chipset). The onboard IDE is an Promise IDE RAID controller, so I don’t
know how well it’ll work with QNX…

-Robert

[Mario_Charest1]

Oops, the moterboard is really a “Soyo K7 Dragon Plus!” (Via KT266A
chipset). The onboard IDE is an Promise IDE RAID controller, so I don’t
know how well it’ll work with QNX…

Not supported in 6.1.

-Robert

[Igor_Kovalenko2]

Performance of 2940 with older drives (which your 9Gb probably is) won’t be
shining with any motheboards. I have that combo too and the only way to get
better results is to enable write-back cache in the SCSI BIOS. Writing
bandwidth will increase about 5 times after that but you better get yourself
a UPS. Newer AHA 29160 controllers with newer SCSI disks work much faster
and don’t depend on write-back cache that way, for some reason.

That probably would be best choise to run QNX right now. To make it even
better you should pick a board with 64bit PCI slot (the 29160 has 64-bit
interface although it will work in 32bit slot). All such boards are dual
(SMP), based on either AMD762 chipset (Athlon) or new Intel chipset (E7500
or somesuch), or older Pentium 3 chipsets. QNX works very well on SMP (i
mean it utilizes SMP very well).

If you want 3D video you want Voodoo, so get Voodoo 3/4/5. Or perhaps ATI
Radeon, bets are that if anything else than Voodoo will be supported for 3D
then it will be ATI first. For ethernet a very cheap and very good NetGear
FA310 (based on tulip chip) would be as good as it gets for now.

– igor

“Robert Agustin” <agustin@apicom.com> wrote in message
news:3CA8E3D0.3020201@apicom.com…

Here’s details on the AMD machine that I tried:

Soyo K7 Dragon (don’t know bios revision, can dig up later)
AMD Athlon XP 1800
512MB DDR-SDRAM
Adaptec 2940UW (bios v2.57.2)
9GB UW scsi drive
Creative GeForce2 GTS video card
Lynksys PCI ethernet card

• Tested QNX v6.1.0
• everything seems to work (did default installation)
• hard drive access is fairly slow
  (especially for compiling source code)
• have not tried on-board IDE controller yet
• have not tried on-board sound
• video card 2D works well
• have not tried to test video card 3D
• ethernet card works well
  
  
  -Robert

[Bill_Caroselli_Q-TPS]

Why is performance for 2940’s so poor with RTP? I mean, why so much worse
than QNX4?

“Igor Kovalenko” <kovalenko@attbi.com> wrote in message
news:a8clpf$jf8$1@inn.qnx.com…

Performance of 2940 with older drives (which your 9Gb probably is) won’t
be
shining with any motheboards. I have that combo too and the only way to
get
better results is to enable write-back cache in the SCSI BIOS. Writing
bandwidth will increase about 5 times after that but you better get
yourself
a UPS. Newer AHA 29160 controllers with newer SCSI disks work much faster
and don’t depend on write-back cache that way, for some reason.

That probably would be best choise to run QNX right now. To make it even
better you should pick a board with 64bit PCI slot (the 29160 has 64-bit
interface although it will work in 32bit slot). All such boards are dual
(SMP), based on either AMD762 chipset (Athlon) or new Intel chipset (E7500
or somesuch), or older Pentium 3 chipsets. QNX works very well on SMP (i
mean it utilizes SMP very well).

If you want 3D video you want Voodoo, so get Voodoo 3/4/5. Or perhaps ATI
Radeon, bets are that if anything else than Voodoo will be supported for
3D
then it will be ATI first. For ethernet a very cheap and very good NetGear
FA310 (based on tulip chip) would be as good as it gets for now.

– igor

“Robert Agustin” <> agustin@apicom.com> > wrote in message
news:> 3CA8E3D0.3020201@apicom.com> …
Here’s details on the AMD machine that I tried:

Soyo K7 Dragon (don’t know bios revision, can dig up later)
AMD Athlon XP 1800
512MB DDR-SDRAM
Adaptec 2940UW (bios v2.57.2)
9GB UW scsi drive
Creative GeForce2 GTS video card
Lynksys PCI ethernet card

• Tested QNX v6.1.0
• everything seems to work (did default installation)
• hard drive access is fairly slow
  (especially for compiling source code)
• have not tried on-board IDE controller yet
• have not tried on-board sound
• video card 2D works well
• have not tried to test video card 3D
• ethernet card works well
  
  
  -Robert
  \

[Robert_Agustin]

Do you know if the AHA 29160 will perform better than a well-supported
IDE controller chip under QNX? How much of a difference does the 64-bit
PCI slot make?

BTW, THANKS!!! I’ve been looking for “unofficial” information like
this for a while now. I did read your old posting about filesystem
speed and having to flash the 2940UW’s bios to the latest version to get
it to work faster, and indeed it did. I’ll see if I can run off and get
the 29160 and test it out.

-Robert


Igor Kovalenko wrote:

Performance of 2940 with older drives (which your 9Gb probably is) won’t be
shining with any motheboards. I have that combo too and the only way to get
better results is to enable write-back cache in the SCSI BIOS. Writing
bandwidth will increase about 5 times after that but you better get yourself
a UPS. Newer AHA 29160 controllers with newer SCSI disks work much faster
and don’t depend on write-back cache that way, for some reason.

That probably would be best choise to run QNX right now. To make it even
better you should pick a board with 64bit PCI slot (the 29160 has 64-bit
interface although it will work in 32bit slot). All such boards are dual
(SMP), based on either AMD762 chipset (Athlon) or new Intel chipset (E7500
or somesuch), or older Pentium 3 chipsets. QNX works very well on SMP (i
mean it utilizes SMP very well).

If you want 3D video you want Voodoo, so get Voodoo 3/4/5. Or perhaps ATI
Radeon, bets are that if anything else than Voodoo will be supported for 3D
then it will be ATI first. For ethernet a very cheap and very good NetGear
FA310 (based on tulip chip) would be as good as it gets for now.

– igor

“Robert Agustin” <> agustin@apicom.com> > wrote in message
news:> 3CA8E3D0.3020201@apicom.com> …

Here’s details on the AMD machine that I tried:

Soyo K7 Dragon (don’t know bios revision, can dig up later)
AMD Athlon XP 1800
512MB DDR-SDRAM
Adaptec 2940UW (bios v2.57.2)
9GB UW scsi drive
Creative GeForce2 GTS video card
Lynksys PCI ethernet card

• Tested QNX v6.1.0
• everything seems to work (did default installation)
• hard drive access is fairly slow
  (especially for compiling source code)
• have not tried on-board IDE controller yet
• have not tried on-board sound
• video card 2D works well
• have not tried to test video card 3D
• ethernet card works well
  
  
  -Robert
  
  \

[Robert_Agustin]

Finally got the Adaptec 29160 and a 36GB U160 SCSI drive in yesterday
and ran some tests by swapping it with the 2940UW in my system.

iozone w/100MB file reports write of ~17MB/sec, write of ~25MB/sec. Not
too shabby, but for some reason it still doesn’t seem quite as optimized
as it should be. Then again I only have 32-bit PCI slots on my
motherboard, so the card isn’t running as fast as it could be.

Compile times are definitely faster now – initial tests of very small
compiles show that the machine with the new disk controller is about 40%
faster than the 650Mhz PIII Dell Laptop with IDE drive. I’m still in
the process of testing how long complete source tree builds take on both
machines, but it’s initially looking like the diference will be about
the same.

Igor, thanks for the recommendation.

-Robert

P.S. - I’ll probably be putting together a SMP machine with at least one
64-bit PCI slot in the next couple of weeks based on this success, so
I’ll let you all know how that turns out.


Robert Agustin wrote:

Do you know if the AHA 29160 will perform better than a well-supported
IDE controller chip under QNX? How much of a difference does the 64-bit
PCI slot make?

BTW, THANKS!!! I’ve been looking for “unofficial” information like
this for a while now. I did read your old posting about filesystem
speed and having to flash the 2940UW’s bios to the latest version to get
it to work faster, and indeed it did. I’ll see if I can run off and get
the 29160 and test it out.

-Robert


Igor Kovalenko wrote:

Performance of 2940 with older drives (which your 9Gb probably is)
won’t be
shining with any motheboards. I have that combo too and the only way
to get
better results is to enable write-back cache in the SCSI BIOS. Writing
bandwidth will increase about 5 times after that but you better get
yourself
a UPS. Newer AHA 29160 controllers with newer SCSI disks work much faster
and don’t depend on write-back cache that way, for some reason.

That probably would be best choise to run QNX right now. To make it even
better you should pick a board with 64bit PCI slot (the 29160 has 64-bit
interface although it will work in 32bit slot). All such boards are dual
(SMP), based on either AMD762 chipset (Athlon) or new Intel chipset
(E7500
or somesuch), or older Pentium 3 chipsets. QNX works very well on SMP (i
mean it utilizes SMP very well).

If you want 3D video you want Voodoo, so get Voodoo 3/4/5. Or perhaps ATI
Radeon, bets are that if anything else than Voodoo will be supported
for 3D
then it will be ATI first. For ethernet a very cheap and very good
NetGear
FA310 (based on tulip chip) would be as good as it gets for now.

– igor

“Robert Agustin” <> agustin@apicom.com> > wrote in message
news:> 3CA8E3D0.3020201@apicom.com> …

Here’s details on the AMD machine that I tried:

Soyo K7 Dragon (don’t know bios revision, can dig up later)
AMD Athlon XP 1800
512MB DDR-SDRAM
Adaptec 2940UW (bios v2.57.2)
9GB UW scsi drive
Creative GeForce2 GTS video card
Lynksys PCI ethernet card

• Tested QNX v6.1.0
• everything seems to work (did default installation)
• hard drive access is fairly slow
  (especially for compiling source code)
• have not tried on-board IDE controller yet
• have not tried on-board sound
• video card 2D works well
• have not tried to test video card 3D
• ethernet card works well
  
  
  -Robert
  
  
  
  \

[Robert_Agustin]

Have a little more information now, as well as some things to watch out
for when building a dual-processor machine with the Tyan Thunder K7. If
you’re using this motherboard, you need to be aware of a few things:

• The power supply required is NOT a standard ATX power supply. It is
  an ATX-GES powersupply which has slightly different power connectors. I
  ended up getting the NMB 460 Watt power supply (don’t know exact model
  number, but it was labelled specifically for “Dual AMD motherboard”.

• The case you get must be big enough for this motherboard. I got the
  enermax FS-710 case and replaced the power supply with the compatible one.

• The heatsinks you get must be fairly small. I got ones from Alpha
  first and they were waaay to big. Then I got ThermalRight SK-6’s and
  they fit pretty well but are really noisy. Going to have to replace
  those fans later…

• The memory required is NOT your standard unbuffered DDR-SDRAM. You
  need to make sure you get “registered” DDR-SDRAM or else you’ll get
  weird memory errors at boot time up the wazoo. I’m going to run and
  pick up some of this memory in a few hours.

I was able to get QNX hobbling on it with one stick of 256MB of
unbuffered DDR-SDRAM installed, but it wasn’t too pretty. Hopefully it
all runs when I drop the new memory in place…

-Robert