On Tue, 19 Feb 2002, Peter Bell wrote:

> My home lan has a number of RiscPCs on it, together with one old Win98
> box, and a few other odds and ends.  I have both ISDN and ADSL routers
> on the LAN, which is mainly Cat5 with a 16 port 10/100 switch.
> 
> I would like to configure a server on the network - mainly to act as
> a file server, but also handling mail and news.  Would it be
> reasonable to use a RPC/StrongARM for this function, running
> ARMLinux or NetBSD.


Certainly back in mists of time, I was involved in selling RiscPCs for
this purpose (under duress I must note - CATS machines were
significantly quicker). We had in the region of 40 NCs booting from 1
standard RiscPC which had also running Apache/Squid/Sendmail, etc. I'm not
saying it did it very quickly though...

> Is there/is anyone working on drivers for the APDL Blitz IDE card, or
> would I have to make do with the slower Arcin card (for which I
> believe there is a driver), or is there another faster option?  I
> believe that the claims for the Arcin card are that it will achieve
> more than 4MB/s under RISC OS and the Blitz ~7.5MB/s.  Would these
> figures be matched by the Linux/NetBSD driver.

Claims != truth...

I did some benchmarks with bonnie on a SA RiscPC with various IDE
interfaces (Internet, RapIDE and Simtec). I've also included the internal
IDE on a CATS for comparison:

Internal:
              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
         1024  1084 41.7  1278 33.2   686 27.2  1192 37.3  1440 24.1  47.0 13.3

RapIDE:

              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
         1024  1218 45.0  1472 33.5   772 29.6  1286 40.3  1582 26.9  48.2 13.4

Simtec:

              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
         1024  1087 41.4  1279 33.2   686 27.0  1195 37.2  1444 24.1  46.4 13.1

CATS:

              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
         1024  3274 87.4  5914 60.7  2417 49.1  3054 87.0  4412 60.7  49.6  6.9

-- 
Stephen