Hi, Welcome to OpenSolaris.
Tip: Some times x86 IO controller problems can come from a BIOS bug making a SATA controller run in PATA (legacy mode). I seen this before. Make sure you have a up to date BIOS. In regards to responsiveness. Pick a WM such a Fluxbox instead of Gnome. You may just find that it frees up heaps of system time to do more useful things. ZFS root will really help you as long as you have plenty of RAM. Make sure to kit your system out with as much RAM as you can stick in it as its so cheap today. I would say 2GB minimum, 4GB+ preferred. You _may_ think this is a lot but modern software has modern requirements, your really see the difference in regards to IO as ZFS will 'read ahead' and cache into RAM, trust me ! Oh and I think all the above advice is very good so take note of it ! Yes and snv_100 is going to be a big one next week or so. So keep a eye out for that :D I know I am ! Best Regards, Edward. 2008/9/26 Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de>: > James Cornell <sparcdr at gmail.com> wrote: > >> Reg Me Please wrote: >> > What do you mean with the scaring "less than optimal"? :-) >> > >> > I'd like to read more about experiences in running OS on laptops. >> > I'm currently running Linux and feel sick about the un-responsiveness of >> > the system whie, say, burning a CD or copying large files. >> > Is OS's scheduler smarter than the Linux's ones? > > Yes, the OpenSolaris scheduler is definitely better suited for most cases - in > special CD/DVD/BluRay burning. > > >> Very debatable due to legacy reasons and an ever present balancing act >> as Sun is still a large scale server vendor, but in terms of comparing >> say OS to Solaris 10, there has been leadway with user perceptual >> responsiveness. Generally all OS will bottleneck these days due to disk >> speed rather than CPU. CD/DVD burners generally write at 18x or >> 22,050kb/s (20mb/s) saturating about 50-75% of the typically available >> disk I/O and some systems cannot manage to run with the remaining I/O. > > DVD burners for laptops use the same chipsets as "big ones" but run at most > at half spindle speed. 8x (may be 10x) seems to be the max DVD write speed > for laptop drives. This is less than 12850 kB/s. > > If you have a hals way recent HDD in the laptop this is no problem. > > Note that if both HDD and CD/DVD writer are on PATA, you share the chip > transfer speed. > > If you connect a writer via USB, first check whether your USB controller and > the USB <-> (s)ATA adaptor have no problems with sustained speed. > > >> The issue with CPU's, especially when talking about Intel Core 2 and >> newer is a non-issue from my experience and general slowdowns are >> generally an indicator of other hardware issues or areas which need >> addressing. > > Cdrecord did never use more than 5% of the total CPU performance even for > older > systems. Exception: PATA using PIO. For this reason ignore hints from people > in > the net and always connect PATA CD/DVD writers via a 80 wire cable. > > Make sure that you never try to write a CD or DVD from a image file that > lives in > /tmp (tmpfs) as the Solaris pager daemon has a serious performance problem > when > there is a need to page in data. > > J?rg > > -- > EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 > Berlin > js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) > schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: > http://schily.blogspot.com/ > URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily > _______________________________________________ > laptop-discuss mailing list > laptop-discuss at opensolaris.org > -- All Documents adhered to the ISO/IEC 26300 standard file format for electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents from this email address. The author does not take responsibility of the recipients inability to read international standards and who use proprietary products such as MS Office. See: http://www.openoffice.org/ Edward O'Callaghan. -- http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EdwardOcallaghan http://moonshine.opn4.org/ http://www.pcbsd.org/
