[CentOS] question on firewire support and centosplus

[Joe Landman]

Hi Lee:

   Thanks for the pointers.  I have FC4 on another box with the USB2 
connected to it.  I am getting about 35 MB/s reads (VIA chipset), and 
about 15-20 MB/s writes.  The context switching is horrible, and drives 
the processor load way up.

   I will install the new Centosplus RPMs for the kernel.  I presume I 
can do it via yum and adding it into the repos.  Thanks.

joe

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-10-02 at 10:05, Joe Landman wrote:
>> Hi folks:
>>
>>    Firewire was not supported in 4.0 due to the upstream provider not 
>> including it.  Is it in 4.1?  Or is it still out of the mainline 
>> upstream kernel provider?  What about centosplus?  Centosplus has been 
>> listed as unsupported.  I presume this means that they are/were one-off 
>> builds with missing functionality (e.g. xfs, etc), and are not updated. 
>>   Is this the case?  I am looking at this for an important server, and I 
>> want to make sure that if we switch to the centosplus kernel that we 
>> haven't messed up the rest of the package support, or major kernel bugfixes.
> 
> The unsupported kernel just re-enables the things that are present
> in fedora kernels (at least...) but were turned off in RHEL.  The
> kernel is rebuilt on updates so you don't lose anything by using
> it.
> 
>>    The reason I am curious about firewire is that I would like to use 
>> the firewire interface rather than the USB interface for our backup 
>> drives.   Its not much faster, just fewer context switches (e.g. lower 
>> server load).
> 
> I'm using firewire on an FC3 box and am less than thrilled with the
> stability.   The recent update to 2.6.13.x on FC4 looks promising
> but I haven't tested enough to be sure.   Unless you have to
> use firewire now, wait till you have at least a 2.6.13 kernel.
> The box I'm using only has USB 1.0 ports so that's not a
> reasonable alternative.
> 

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
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