Subject: MOL performance quirks
From: Timothy A. Seufert (tas@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Feb 04 2000 - 05:17:30 MST
I finally got MOL on my machine. I'm using 0.9.39 with kernel
version 2.2.15-pre5. I've tried it unsuccessfully in the past, long
before it was provided as a RPM, but I had nasty problems (crash on
MOL startup which destabilized Linux and forced me to reboot), and
didn't have enough time to sit down and debug it.
This time I just installed the RPM, followed the instructions on the
web page about getting a MacOS ROM file from a MacOS CD, etc., and
had it running in 5 minutes. Great job guys! I'm very impressed
with how far it's come in ease of setup.
The question I have is about performance. It is oddly variable.
Some things go pretty fast, others go at a snail's pace. MacOS boots
quickly enough, but once I'm in the Finder, it takes about 2 seconds
for the Finder to draw the zoom rect animation when opening a window.
But when it draws the window contents it does so acceptably fast
(about as fast as I'd expect for unaccelerated PCI video). When I
click on a menu, the menu draws instantly, but if I try to go to a
submenu I have to leave the mouse cursor on it for several seconds
before the submenu will open.
Is this sort of behavior happening anywhere else? I can't imagine
that it's normal; I see no reason why it would take forever to draw a
zoom rect animation but take a fraction of a second to draw the
window contents. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps the
new MOL code which tries to reduce system load based on MacOS CPU
idling is sometimes getting fooled into not giving the virtual Mac
enough CPU time.
The machine is a 7500 with a 604e/233 CPU card, 256K L2 cache, 96MB
RAM + 128MB swap (MOL is configured for a 64MB memory size) and an
8MB ATI Rage Pro video card. I started out running it in a window in
X, then reconfigured it to run in a virtual console to see if it
helped the speed at all (it didn't). I'm using MacOS 9.0 and the New
World ROM which came on the 9.0 CD.
Also, the MacOS clock is off, and not by a timezone difference -- the
minutes are different from the time shown in Linux.
Thanks for any help or insights, and once again massive thanks to
Samuel and company. It was really cool to bring some coworkers into
my office and show them: "See? X on one VT. Mac on another."
Tim Seufert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Wed Mar 01 2000 - 00:06:20 MST