Nekochan Net

I've seen some discussion about performance issues with O2s and later releases of IRIX.

What's the best route to go on an O2: 22, 26, or 30?

From what I've been able to gather, I am guessing .30 is probably not the answer. However, it is more muddled on the other options. I have found conflicting accounts on when the performance problems begin. Some mention it goes wrong with everything later than .22, and others only releases after .26.

Ideas?


*Edit* This may belong in the IRIX forum, but since there is not much more "Getting Started" than installing, I thought I'd try this first.

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You may need to decide what are you going to do with the O2, if you think about porting stuff to nekoware - then the best answer is 6.5.22m (free from SGI's supportfolio), if you want XVM (not very useful on O2 due to lack of internal drive bays), then 6.5.29 is the way to go.
Personally, I would think much and install 6.5.30 (though I even have 6.5.6 stashed somewhere).

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[click for links to hinv] JP: [ :Fuel: :Octane2: :O2: :Indy: ] PL: [ :Fuel: ]
For Sale: 2*O200 M/B, 2*O200 PSU, 6*256MB O200 RAM, 2*O200 SCSI Backplane, 2*O200 MSC, DMediaPro DM-2 ( 030-1653-002 Rev. H , XT-DIGVID) with Octane XIO pull (Origin pull optionally available)

I probably would go for 6.5.22, but it depends on the processor speed. I am using 6.5.29 and it works very well .

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_Betty Blue_
R12000A 400 Mhz; 1 Gb RAM; 72 Gb 15K HDD; IRIX 6.5.29
CrystalEyes; Dial Box; O2Cam "ZEYE"; external Toshiba SD-M1711 DVD-ROM; Octane speakers;
Lock bar; SGI microphone.
Mods: PSU Noctua fan; internal Toshiba SD-M1401 DVD-ROM; Adaptec AIC-7880P SCSI card.

_REKIEM_I7_
Seasonic X 1250W PSU / Intel I7 2600k 4 x 5,00 Ghz / 2 x Gainward 2Gb GTX 560Ti Phantom 2 / 32 Gb DDR3 / Intel x25-M 160 Gb SSD and 2 x 1,5 Tb HDDs
_Lazarus_
2 x Intel Xeon MP Gallatin 3,00 Ghz with 4 MB cache / Zotac 512Mb GT430 / 12 Gb DDR266 ECC / 4 x Maxtor Atlas 146GB 10K V U320

I'm running 6.5.30 on both my O2s, but I'm not doing anything really intensive.

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33mhz R3k/48mb/XS24 150mhz R4400/256mb/XL24 600mhz R14kA/2gb/V10 8x1.4ghz Itanium 2/8GB 32x600mhz R14kA/24GB 4x700mhz R16k/8GB/V12/DCD/SAS/FC/DM5 2x700mhz R16k/4GB

is there really so much of a difference between .22 and .30? both are quite late and large changes already happened
is there any special reason to run some release between .22 and .30?

Dr. Dave did some non-trivial testing quite a while ago, you should be able to find his posts on the subject. Going from memory, anything newer than 6.5.23 showed a substantial loss of performance on an O2. 10%-ish, I think..

On a 16ghz Intel machine that probably doesn't matter but on a 300 mhz r5, not so good.

The larger issue might be the bugs/security holes/etc that were patched, or features that were added to or removed from IRIX during each subsequent sub-release.

There are a number of feature additions and removals, the default printing system installed was one that drew quite a few comments (and that one is an easily correctable issue). While it didn't generate as much conversation, it's also worth noting that IRIX was patched a number of times during the update release cycle.

I haven't had an O2 in quite a while, but when I did there weren't any obvious (to me) seat-of-the-pants performance issues between 6.5.22 and the latest revision I ran (6.5.30 or .29 best I can recall).

Everything else being equal, unless you have access to all of the patches that were incorporated during the IRIX 6.5 revision history, I'd recommend running the latest revision you have access to.

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The CPU is really important here. When I had the R12000 at 270 Mhz the computer seemed to be a bit pushed when using 6.5.29 or 6.5.30 and I went back to 6.5.22. However, with the 400 Mhz CPU, IRIX 6.5.29 works just fine, at least for my every day taks (MP3, PDFs, FTP, backups, terminal...). It is also very stable, I have the computer on and doing things during 12 hours a day and it works like a charm .

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_Betty Blue_
R12000A 400 Mhz; 1 Gb RAM; 72 Gb 15K HDD; IRIX 6.5.29
CrystalEyes; Dial Box; O2Cam "ZEYE"; external Toshiba SD-M1711 DVD-ROM; Octane speakers;
Lock bar; SGI microphone.
Mods: PSU Noctua fan; internal Toshiba SD-M1401 DVD-ROM; Adaptec AIC-7880P SCSI card.

_REKIEM_I7_
Seasonic X 1250W PSU / Intel I7 2600k 4 x 5,00 Ghz / 2 x Gainward 2Gb GTX 560Ti Phantom 2 / 32 Gb DDR3 / Intel x25-M 160 Gb SSD and 2 x 1,5 Tb HDDs
_Lazarus_
2 x Intel Xeon MP Gallatin 3,00 Ghz with 4 MB cache / Zotac 512Mb GT430 / 12 Gb DDR266 ECC / 4 x Maxtor Atlas 146GB 10K V U320

I haven't tried .30, but I did try .22 and .26. Subjectively, I do think .22 is a touch snappier. FF especially. I haven't done any objective benchmarks, however, so there is a chance it is in my head.

However, .22 was a nightmare to install vs. .26. 26 came off without a hitch on the first try. 22 gave me all sorts of weird problems. The most dramatic was when I applied the patches... 7060 broke the kernel. I finally figured out what had happened and backed it out, but it took a while. Note to future searchers, never install patch 7060 or 5920 on a 32b 6.5.22 machine. It will hose your kernel, which cause a kernel panic with 'read address error'.

Then Firefox wouldn't display large JPGs properly (was trying to get a picture of a hummingbird off Wikipedia for a background). It gave bizarre errors about the image containing an error. I'd looked at the same picture of the same hummingbird and it worked fine on .26. Then it got even worse and FF started crashing. A thorough 'rqsall' fixed that... but at some point it broke swmgr. swmgr/tardist/inst would all hang reading installed packages. Per some Nekochan advice, I used 'par' to watch what was happening on 'inst', and sure enough, it was getting a 'Not enough space' error after a 'brk'. I checked the core, and decided libinst.so was probably the culprit, and moved it with 'rqs'. All was well after that.

It will be a while yet before the time I save using .22 makes up for the time I spent installing it vs. .26!

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It will be a loooong while before all the time I've wasted on computers bears any worthwhile dividends

My favorite was actually 6.5.21 patched up to 22 level. Still had Display Postscript and a lot of the good utilities standard. They took those out in 6.5.22. Save a nickel, bastardize the quality. Nobody ever notices when your hi-tech product turns to shit, oh no.

I'm thinking of putting 6.3 back on the O2 ....