Re: Booting NetBSD/alpha 9.1 on AXPbox

[Remy van Elst <relst%relst.nl@localhost>]

Hey Chris,

Your mailing list post from earlier this year made me check out NetBSD 
on AXPbox, after I did the QEMU article. It seems to work quite well,
however some crashes occur when using networking, graphics or > 512 MB 
ram. Here is my article:

https://raymii.org/s/articles/NetBSD_Alpha_AXPbox.html

It includes all the crashes I found with output, which will hopefully be 
helpful when debugging them.

I also updated the AXPbox wiki 
(https://github.com/lenticularis39/axpbox/wiki/NetBSD-9.2-install-guide) 
- but in a more tutorial style way than my post.


The funny thing is that QEMU horribly fails openssl benchmarks (see my 
qemu guide, I've updated that with benchmarks, 
https://raymii.org/s/articles/NetBSD_on_QEMU_Alpha.html) but with 
sysbench, axpbox seems to be two to three times slower than AXPbox. 
Summarized below are the AXPbox results:

    CPU: total number of events: 19
    Memory: 447.07 MB transferred (7.45 MB/sec)
    Disk: Operations performed:  0 Read, 37353 Write, 0 Other = 37353 Total
    Read 0b  Written 583.64Mb  Total transferred 583.64Mb  (9.7263Mb/sec)
      622.48 Requests/sec executed

These are the QEMU results, running on the same host machine and the 
same NetBSD version:

    CPU: total number of events: 532
    Memory: 1228.18 MB transferred (20.47 MB/sec)
    Disk: Operations performed:  0 Read, 131072 Write, 8 Other = 131080 
    Total
     Read 0b  Written 2Gb  Total transferred 2Gb  (34.332Mb/sec)
     2197.25 Requests/sec executed




I'm really excited about all these new developments in Alpha emulation 
land. Fun to play around with and hopefully Jason has some time to make 
(the QEMU/netbsd side) even better.


Cheers,
Remy