Hi Freaks!

I am now "using" (which means installing and testing!) RiscBSD four about
four weeks. I upgraded my SA-driven RiscPC with a Quantum Fireball TM 2.1GB
and added 32MB DRAM. So RiscBSD seems to run fine in comparison to these
old Sun's here at my University. But when I compare the system performance
in some cases RiscBSD really needs to be improved, I think. Just look at
Suse's Linux for IBM-PC's: After typing "xterm &" there is a delay of, well
say just a half of a second and there it is! Under RiscBSD this procedure takes
several seconds, with a SA and 40MB RAM! I also tested the performance by
comparing the execution times of unzipping large files with gunzip. There the
difference was much bigger and I think that the lack of a Math-Coproc is not
a sensible reason for this. So I assume that there are a lot of routines in the
kernel which can be improved, or am I wrong?

Okay, I am not experienced with UNIX-systems but with writing effective
machine-code which has to run under RISC-OS. To shorten this message:

Could anybody summarize the procedures to build new kernels?
Do these simple utilities like 'cp' or 'gunzip' take advantage of these
improved routines or do they have to be recompiled?
Why does RiscBSD not take advantage of a kind of a "SharedCLibrary" like it is
used under RISCOS? (As I look at the code-size of the utilities above I
understand why using RiscBSD needs upgrading your hardware...)

Well, I would be happy if I could give a little of my knowledge to the
porting team in order to make life easier using RiscBSD. So if there are
some code sequences which need to be optimised using Assembler code, here
I am!

Marc Theisen (no, not Mike Tyson!)