Re: Trying NetBSD 9.1 on KA650 and VAXstation 3100m38

[David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Mon, 16 Nov 2020 at 13:08, Johnny Billquist <bqt%update.uu.se@localhost> wrote:
>
> On 2020-11-16 03:54, Boris Gjenero wrote:
> > The password algorithm is mostly to blame for how slow logins are when a
> > password is set. Take a look at
> > https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-9.1/vax/passwd.conf.5 . In the 9.1
> > /etc/passwd.conf, it's set to sha1, and the default is 24680 rounds,
> > which is slow. Changing it to old speeds up logins. But of course other
> > things are still slow.
>
> The slowness I observe is absurd, and is clearly not at all related to
> any passwords.
>
> > At least with MSCP disk access using an RQDX3, DMA is clearly used, and
> > amount of CPU time doesn't seem excessive:
> >  > # time dd if=/dev/rra0c of=/dev/null bs=128k count=100 skip=100
> >  > 100+0 records in
> >  > 100+0 records out
> >  > 13107200 bytes transferred in 41.480 secs (315988 bytes/sec)
> >  >        42.80 real         0.71 user         3.24 sys
>
> Of course it uses DMA. There are no alternatives. (There is no polled
> I/O on these systems.)
>
> However, that test isn't really exposing/reflecting what I seem to observe.
> Doing something like a cvs update, the disk is pretty much 100% busy for
> many, many hours, and the whole time, the system is also mainly ticking
> up system time. I am not sure that time is accounted into the cvs
> process, though.
>
> But about 300K/sec. My PDP-11 pushes that much. The VAX should be able
> to do better, I think. But even more interesting is, could the machine
> then do something else at the same time, or is it bogged down here?
>
> But try your test again, but this time run "system vmstat" at the same
> time, and check how the system as a whole is reporting. You would expect
> that it sits mostly idle, but I suspect it don't...
>
> I need to boot my physical machine to do a similar test. I'll get back
> with observations...
>

Could I suggest building a static NetBSD release to test (it will
likely be RA92 big :), or running some tests with binaries in /rescue
(which include ssh, tar, expr, gzip, bzip2, as well as sh). A while
back I ran some comparisons on simh and while some initial numbers
suggested the static binaries were around the same speed, repeating
them gave significant differences. (My VAX hardware is still buried at
the moment)

David