kern/78711: Parallel printer incredibly slow
Jason Bacon
bacon at smithers.neuro.mcw.edu
Sun Jul 3 00:48:32 GMT 2005
The following reply was made to PR kern/78711; it has been noted by GNATS.
From: Jason Bacon <bacon at smithers.neuro.mcw.edu>
To: Suporte Matik <asstec at matik.com.br>
Cc: freebsd-bugs at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: kern/78711: Parallel printer incredibly slow
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 11:11:03 -0600 (CST)
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There was a mistake in my fix: The real solution is lptcontrol -p (not=20
lptcontrol -s). "lptcontrol -s" restored functionality at one point after=
=20
several other tweaks, but by itself, after a fresh reboot, does not solve=
=20
the problem, while "lptcontrol -p" does.
I also tried forcing the mode to ECP with
loader.conf
-----------
hint.ppc.0.flags=3D"0xC8"
dmesg.boot
----------
ppc0: <ECP parallel printer port> port 0x778-0x77b,0x378-0x37b irq 7 drq 3=
=20
flags
0xc8 on acpi0
ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP-only) in ECP mode
ppbus0: <Parallel port bus> on ppc0
ppbus0: IEEE1284 device found /NIBBLE
Probing for PnP devices on ppbus0:
ppbus0: <EPSON Stylus COLOR 640> PRINTER ESCPL2,BDC
plip0: <PLIP network interface> on ppbus0
lpt0: <Printer> on ppbus0
lpt0: Interrupt-driven port
ppi0: <Parallel I/O> on ppbus0
This did NOT help - I still had to use "lptcontrol -p" to get the printer=
=20
running at normal speed.
I also found that polling puts a pretty heavy load on the system under=20
some circumstances, like printing a high-quality photo from my iBook lpd=20
client, although for most printing (e.g. printing WEB pages and OpenOffice=
=20
docs through the stc_h filter) the load is negligible.
The iBook client prints through a raw queue:
stc_raw:\
:lp=3D/dev/lpt0:\
:sd=3D/var/spool/lpd/stc_raw:\
:lf=3D/var/spool/lpd/stc_raw/log:\
:af=3D/var/spool/lpd/stc_raw/acct:\
:mx#0:\
:sh:
so it's definitely due to polling, and not filtering of any sort. Top=20
also showed that most of the load was system time, whereas print filtering=
=20
usually shows up as user time, more specifically "gs".
=09Jason
On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, Suporte Matik wrote:
> On Friday 11 March 2005 19:42, Jason Bacon wrote:
>>> Number: 78711
>>> Category: kern
>>> Synopsis: Parallel printer incredibly slow
>>> Confidential: no
>>> Severity: serious
>>> Release: FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE i386
>> FreeBSD sculpin.tds.net 5.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE #0: Sun Dec 19
>> 15:26:36 CST 2004 bacon at sculpin.tds.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/sculpin
>> i386
>>
>>> Description:
>>
>> =09The parallel printer runs ridiculously slow. It prints normally
>> =09for about 30 seconds, then prints one line every 5 or 10 minutes.
>> =09One photo from an iBook client to a Stylus 640 took about 12 hours
>> =09using lpd server to a raw printer queue. A page from konqueror
>> =09using stc_h driver with apsfilter took over an hour.
>>
>>> How-To-Repeat:
>>
>> =09Print any lengthy document to the parallel printer.
>>
>
> any two lines text file needs 15 minutes to be printed
>
>>> Fix:
>>
>> =09lptcontrol -s resolves the problem. This looks to me much
>> =09like a timing issue that plagued some googlers in the late 1990s.
>> =09Running in polled mode on this system does not impact the system
>> =09(ASUS P5A, K6-2 500Mhz) significantly,
>>
>
> does not fix, the problem is as well with lpr and cups local/remote
>
> the only way to get "some more speed" is using b/w and 150 dpi on a HPDJ,=
any
> gray or color mode is slow
>
>> =09although it might on a faster, higher volume parallel printer.
>> =09For this reason, forcing the mode to something other than COMPATIBLE
>> =09via /boot/device.hints might be a better alternative for some
>> =09people. Check your BIOS to see what modes are supported for the
>> =09parallel port, and "man ppc" for details on port settings in
>> =09device.hints.
>
> doesn't matter what you set in the BIOS or whatever, any gray or colormod=
e on
> 5.3 is that inacceptable slow
>
> using the exactly same printer and port settings on 5.2.1 or 4.11 brings =
you
> back to the expected printing speed
>
> you even can use the exact same clean ports tree and compiling cupsd +
> foomatic and 5.3 is slow and 5.2.1 and 4.11 is normal speed
>
> But printing to a remote cups tree from 5.3 is giving the normal performa=
nce.
>
>
> Hans
>
>
>>
>>> Release-Note:
>>> Audit-Trail:
>>> Unformatted:
>>
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>
> --=20
>
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