Re: IBM microdrive.

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On Tuesday 19 February 2002 19:19, you wrote:
>[...]
> I tried, and it was missing lots of drivers. But I found 2.4.17-rmk2, which
> I was building until it hung on me, so I think now I will go home and
> continue tomorrow.

2.4.17-rmk5 is now installed. It's *much* faster, *much* more stable, and I
can now get useful work done on it.

I think what I could have been seeing with the stock kernel is the dreaded
Rik VM churn. Certainly, a couple of times when it didn't lock up solid I
could see that kswapd was using 99% CPU time (even with no swap enabled). The
2.4.17 kernel has no trouble. Even the hard disk throughput has improved ---
instead of 150kB/s, I'm now getting 1.5MB/s, which is still pretty poor more
or less what I expect given 16-bit PCMCIA.

Some notes:

The standard /linuxrc script doesn't work properly with 2.4.17. The
invocation of cardmgr just before the menu doesn't find the cards. I changed
the line to just "cardmgr" (which loads it in daemon mode rather than just
looking for the cards and exiting) and now it's fine. It even seems to be
detecting the hard drive every time, which is nice.

I'm still sticking with my 31MB swap partition but I'll give the 256MB one a
go and report back.

- --
David Given
dg@tao-group.com

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Received on Wed Feb 20 11:38:12 2002