On Mon, Aug 02, 1999 at 12:01:28AM -0500, Peter Seebach wrote:
> So, I finally got an Alpha running.  So.  I have this fast box.  Before I
> spend months connecting and disconnecting hardware, I'm wondering if there's
> any general pattern to which devices will work on an Alpha, and which won't.
> For instance, my cheapo ethernet cards don't seem to probe, but my 3Com does.
> 
> I've noticed that some options I'm used to seeing on are off in GENERIC,
> such as kernfs and procfs.  Do these have problems, or are they just not
> useful to Alpha users?  :)
> 
> This is all pretty new to me.  Currently, I've got a scratch install on an
> EIDE drive, but I'm hoping to eventually beef the machine up a little.
> 
> BTW, just a data point:  My PC164 and my PII-333 count to 1 billion in almost
> exactly the same amount of time with 'cc -O'.

Rebuild the world with -O2 -mcpu=21164a -Wa,-m21164a and you'll be downright
astounded how much faster some things go.  Since there's a huge speed boost
for code like DES encryption that shouldn't benefit tremendously from the
new instructions this turns on, my SWAG is that the presence of these
instructions to do bytewise operations avoids some *other* huge lose in
GCC on the Alpha.  Either that, or GCC's memory-latency model for the
21164A happens to be exactly right for these boards... which I suppose is
also quite possible.