Hi
I was trying to watch I/O today as I installed x86 B72 on one of my
PC's
this was ( obviously ) my first real use of the nv_sata driver.
The box I have here has a 10.000 rpm SATA system drive and the Nvidia
nforce4
chipset. prtconf -D showed that the nv_sata driver was used during
installation.
The DVD unit is a fairly modern NEC DVD R/W Dual Layer unit about 1-2
years old.
I ran "iostat -xn 10 100 " repeatedly during the installation.
the final mean values ended up such that the DVD had a busy value of 66%
often peaking above 90% during the 45 minutes install run.
The system disk busy mean value was only 12 % and was hardly ever higher
than 50 % during the run.
I Have read many of these discussions about the
/var/sadm/install/contents
file being the bottleneck for faster installation,
But have you rellay looked a the time Consumed by the DVD player.
The bottleneck on this system is the DVD unit.
If I could somewhere find a mythical 30x speed DVD unit I assume
Install time would drop drastically.
I should try doing a Jumpstart with B73
oh well , that was my 5 cents.
//Lars
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