Subject: Re: good news! pk's new pmap saves me much memory!
To: None <port-sparc@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Paul Riethmuller <par@sequent.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 05/09/1995 10:34:00
That's a huge win!
This raises an interesting question for me. Is anyone doing any
serious performance work on the 4c ?
The reason I ask is that someone just pointed me at a paper on
"Hardware Profiling of Kernels", Andrew McRae, USENIX Jan 93.
A precis is that to minimize sideffects of the profiling instrument
on performance, Andrew built a simple piece of hardware which plugged
in the boot rom socket of a WD ethernet card. Using a hacked gcc, he
was able to recompile 386BSD to automatically generate function entry
and exit events to write through the socket to a RAM based data logger.
All for $100.
It crossed my mind that this could also be done quite easily via the
NVRAM/TOD socket on the 4c machines. I have enough HW skill to build it.
Any comments/interest ?
Regards
Paul