David Campbell (campbell@torque.net)
Sat, 23 Jan 1999 08:36:39 +0800
Date sent: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 16:12:23 -0500 (EST)
From: Mahesh Madhav <mjm@sanitarium.harkness.brown.edu>
Send reply to: mjm@brown.edu
To: grant@torque.net
Copies to: linux-parport@torque.net
Subject: Re: [PARPORT] Lava Parallel Accelerator
> On Tue, 19 Jan 1999 grant@torque.net wrote:
>
> > > Has anyone tried the Lava PCI card that gives you a parallel port "three
> > > or four times the speed of a motherboard EPP port"
> >
> > Ok, I went out and got one of these things. I haven't done exhaustive
> > testing, but here's what I've found.
> >
>
> one thing that I was also curious about:
> By using this PCI card, did that take a lot of load off of your
> processor when you were doing your large file copy tests?
>
> Right now when I am transferring huge files, my load goes up to ~2.0
> due to the io, and makes my computer almost unusable.
I must of missed Grant's message (too many hours in the office). Due to the way
EPP interacts with the CPU, the bottle neck in the system is either going to be
the ISA IO interface OR the end device.
MB/min (560k/sec) regardless of the machine which causes me to suspect the
limit is the drive itself. I will have to dig around the parport mail list
archive and see if I can find some more details, like a distributor I can buy
one from "down under" (eg: .au).
I am assuming you are using a PARIDE device, when you say the system is
"unusable" do you mean that when you perform heavy IO in one terminal then
perform a simple "ls" of the hard drive that the system either appears locked
up or equivalent to a 300 baud modem (does anyone remember those days where you
could watch the chars indvidually print?)
I had a similar case with EPP and the ZIP drive, without knowing some more
symptoms I would prefer not to pass judgement on the cause. Contact me off list
with the details...
> If the card does reduce the load, would the same thing occur with the
> ISA version of the card?
The card may increase the speed of the transfer, decrease the apparent load for
normal operations but with pure IO there will be no reduction in system load
(just more of the same but quicker, if that makes sense).
David Campbell
=======================================================
campbell@torque.net
Check http://www.torque.net/parport for all Linux parallel port solutions.
Current project list:
a) Get ZIP Plus drive back from waranty claim
b) Maintain Linux ZIP drivers (need to update docs)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Fri 22 Jan 1999 - 19:38:34 EST