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The Henry Spencer Effect
On Sep 18, 1:17 pm, kT wrote:
Hi Everybody! I was really surprised how quickly I was able to identify and reproduce the Henry Spencer Effect, after just a couple of weeks into the project. For those of you unfamiliar with this amazing effect, it's the breakdown of obsolete hardware and software systems under the burden of operating at modern standards. Generally, it is manifested in the overloading of the DMA channel, resulting in the corruption of files during large file transfer, usually when multitasking, with the inevitable tragic results. The K6 Socket 7 motherboards of the 66 MHz FSB variety with the highly integrated chipsets are the most problematic, especially when the bus chips also integrate video, but the Super Socket 7 100 Mhz FSB systems are much more immune to this. For instance, this system is a very old K6-2 3DNow system, and the only problem I'm having is very slow keyboard interrupt response when running continuous cable radio Jazz streaming. Most likely the keyboard problem will disappear if I upgrade to a modern audio card and drivers, and replace the SCSI bus controller and SCSI drive with the IDE drive for which this system was originally designed. Yesterday, I actually got Orbiter to run on a 500 MHz K6-2 3DNow box. It was a real mess to find an nVidia driver capable of accomplishing that, and I still have to tweak the driver version to get it to be stable, but that is a major accomplishment in my book of old dinosaur experiments. Thanks Henry! You're a genius. Turn it into a Linux box (but an older version like RedHat 7.2) and be done with it. Eric |
#2
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The Henry Spencer Effect
Hi Everybody!
I was really surprised how quickly I was able to identify and reproduce the Henry Spencer Effect, after just a couple of weeks into the project. For those of you unfamiliar with this amazing effect, it's the breakdown of obsolete hardware and software systems under the burden of operating at modern standards. Generally, it is manifested in the overloading of the DMA channel, resulting in the corruption of files during large file transfer, usually when multitasking, with the inevitable tragic results. The K6 Socket 7 motherboards of the 66 MHz FSB variety with the highly integrated chipsets are the most problematic, especially when the bus chips also integrate video, but the Super Socket 7 100 Mhz FSB systems are much more immune to this. For instance, this system is a very old K6-2 3DNow system, and the only problem I'm having is very slow keyboard interrupt response when running continuous cable radio Jazz streaming. Most likely the keyboard problem will disappear if I upgrade to a modern audio card and drivers, and replace the SCSI bus controller and SCSI drive with the IDE drive for which this system was originally designed. Yesterday, I actually got Orbiter to run on a 500 MHz K6-2 3DNow box. It was a real mess to find an nVidia driver capable of accomplishing that, and I still have to tweak the driver version to get it to be stable, but that is a major accomplishment in my book of old dinosaur experiments. Thanks Henry! You're a genius. |
#3
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The Henry Spencer Effect
Eric Chomko wrote:
On Sep 18, 1:17 pm, kT wrote: Hi Everybody! I was really surprised how quickly I was able to identify and reproduce the Henry Spencer Effect, after just a couple of weeks into the project. For those of you unfamiliar with this amazing effect, it's the breakdown of obsolete hardware and software systems under the burden of operating at modern standards. Generally, it is manifested in the overloading of the DMA channel, resulting in the corruption of files during large file transfer, usually when multitasking, with the inevitable tragic results. The K6 Socket 7 motherboards of the 66 MHz FSB variety with the highly integrated chipsets are the most problematic, especially when the bus chips also integrate video, but the Super Socket 7 100 Mhz FSB systems are much more immune to this. For instance, this system is a very old K6-2 3DNow system, and the only problem I'm having is very slow keyboard interrupt response when running continuous cable radio Jazz streaming. Most likely the keyboard problem will disappear if I upgrade to a modern audio card and drivers, and replace the SCSI bus controller and SCSI drive with the IDE drive for which this system was originally designed. Yesterday, I actually got Orbiter to run on a 500 MHz K6-2 3DNow box. It was a real mess to find an nVidia driver capable of accomplishing that, and I still have to tweak the driver version to get it to be stable, but that is a major accomplishment in my book of old dinosaur experiments. Thanks Henry! You're a genius. Turn it into a Linux box (but an older version like RedHat 7.2) and be done with it. I couldn't even get Debian to run on it. And I went through multiple Socket 7 boards to confirm what I was actually seeing. I couldn't get a single one of them to work properly on anything. I am done with it. I don't need a Linux firewall that bad. On the other hand, I have a couple of these super socket 7 systems (PC-100) that are upgradeable to K6-2+ and K6-III, and there is still a large community of these users out there, so getting Orbiter to run on such boxes would be a major improvement. I only got half way through the process yesterday (it was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Tsiokovsky, so we were busy with other things) but we got almost all the way to orbit at 10 FPS with a system with no internal second level cache, before it crashed. That could have been simple overheating of the CPU, who knows. It was a Windows 2000 system with DirectX 9.0c, an MX-4000 in a PCI slot, and I had to revert back to nVidia driver 5x.xx to make it work at all : http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_archive.html That's a very long list of drivers to sort through. |
#4
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The Henry Spencer Effect
kT wrote:
Eric Chomko wrote: On Sep 18, 1:17 pm, kT wrote: Hi Everybody! I was really surprised how quickly I was able to identify and reproduce the Henry Spencer Effect, after just a couple of weeks into the project. For those of you unfamiliar with this amazing effect, it's the breakdown of obsolete hardware and software systems under the burden of operating at modern standards. Generally, it is manifested in the overloading of the DMA channel, resulting in the corruption of files during large file transfer, usually when multitasking, with the inevitable tragic results. The K6 Socket 7 motherboards of the 66 MHz FSB variety with the highly integrated chipsets are the most problematic, especially when the bus chips also integrate video, but the Super Socket 7 100 Mhz FSB systems are much more immune to this. For instance, this system is a very old K6-2 3DNow system, and the only problem I'm having is very slow keyboard interrupt response when running continuous cable radio Jazz streaming. Most likely the keyboard problem will disappear if I upgrade to a modern audio card and drivers, and replace the SCSI bus controller and SCSI drive with the IDE drive for which this system was originally designed. Yesterday, I actually got Orbiter to run on a 500 MHz K6-2 3DNow box. It was a real mess to find an nVidia driver capable of accomplishing that, and I still have to tweak the driver version to get it to be stable, but that is a major accomplishment in my book of old dinosaur experiments. Thanks Henry! You're a genius. Turn it into a Linux box (but an older version like RedHat 7.2) and be done with it. I couldn't even get Debian to run on it. And I went through multiple Socket 7 boards to confirm what I was actually seeing. I couldn't get a single one of them to work properly on anything. I am done with it. Try a different distribution http://distrowatch.com/ DamnSmallLinux comes to mind, but you've already chosen the best option. I don't need a Linux firewall that bad. On the other hand, I have a couple of these super socket 7 systems (PC-100) that are upgradeable to K6-2+ and K6-III, and there is still a large community of these users out there, so getting Orbiter to run on such boxes would be a major improvement. I only got half way through the process yesterday (it was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Konstantin Tsiokovsky, so we were busy with other things) but we got almost all the way to orbit at 10 FPS with a system with no internal second level cache, before it crashed. That could have been simple overheating of the CPU, who knows. It was a Windows 2000 system with DirectX 9.0c, an MX-4000 in a PCI slot, and I had to revert back to nVidia driver 5x.xx to make it work at all : http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_archive.html That's a very long list of drivers to sort through. Yeah, old hardware, old concepts. Speaking of Nvidia and video cards, here is something new (I've been waiting for ten years for one of these, didn't notice their arrival last year. But here they are :-) How does your Orbiter run with one of theses? http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce_8800.html Want to use it for more than just playing games? Well, then add this. http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html And you get this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCU7wlusSDI Great video ;-) The N-Body problem with N = 131072 at 346 Gigaflops. -- Craig Fink Courtesy E-Mail Welcome @ |
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