On Saturday 16 June 2001 07:23, Jesper Holmberg wrote:
> Below follow three problems I've had since I installed Mdk8.
> Sorry to post them all in the same message, but I don't know
> whether or not they are related.
>
> What I did during the installation was to change (all
> partitions but one) to ReiserFS. But I did no repartitioning,
> just changed the FS from Ext2.
>
> 1. The harddrive is very slow, compared to before. A rough
> estimate is 3-5 times slower when reading from disk. This is
> also true on fairly small files, which I expected to benefit
> from using ReiserFS.
>
> 2. Using hdparm on the drive has no perceptible change
> whatsoever. I have fiddled with all the ususal settings to
> improve my disappointing performance, but with no effect.
> Doesn't hdparm work with Reiserfs?
>
> 3. The size of one of the partitions is incorrectly estimated
> by df. df says this:
> used:
> /dev/hda6 126M 80M 46M 64% /home
>
> but du -sh /home says this: 52M /home
>
> There seems to be about 30M missing, and this has been th case
> since installing.
>
> Could someone help me shed some light on these issues?
>
> TIA
>
> Jesper
>
> p.s. Here follows my /etc/fstab, if useful:
>
> /dev/hda8 / reiserfs defaults 1 1
> /dev/hda5 /boot ext2 noatime 1 2
> none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
> /dev/hda6 /home reiserfs defaults 1 2
> /mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom supermount fs=iso9660,dev=/dev/cdrom 0 0
> /mnt/floppy /mnt/floppy supermount fs=vfat,dev=/dev/fd0 0 0
> /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows vfat
> user,exec,umask=0,codepage=850,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0 none
> /proc proc defaults 0 0
> /dev/hda7 swap swap defaults 0 0
If you are using a VIA chipset, the slow-down is ftom the
disabling of DMA on the ide bus. The Bug was admitted just
before we shipped, and we had no time to refine the crippling to
the particular bad chip.
Reiserfs is iffy in this latest edition. It is really affecting
other parts of the kernel, particularly nfs. The only good news
is that the notail partitions seem stable (probably no help for
the many small files scenario.)
But reiser is not generally faster on many small files. the
improved storage efficiency ot the system is bought a cost of
incredible code complexity. The notail takes much more storage
for a host of small files, but will look them up a lot faster,
because the data tree structure is not complicated by alien
objects.
Try installing with kernel-linus-2.4.3-2mdk off the install disk
and booting with that. Of course, no reiser partitions but it
should be acceptably fast.
Or wait for MandrakeFreq scheduled to be out soon for a little
more speed, or possibly a lot, and still with Reiser.
Civileme
