Buying recommendation for silent router/fileserver

[Adam McDougall]

Finally got around to it, kern/182818. Thanks for the encouragement.

On 10/12/12 11:14, Adam McDougall wrote:
> I did not, but I put it on my list to try to accomplish.
>
> On 10/11/12 13:41, Adrian Chadd wrote:
>> Did you ever file a PR for the slow SATA behaviour?
>>
>>
>>
>> Adrian
>>
>>
>> On 11 October 2012 09:52, Adam McDougall <mcdouga9 at egr.msu.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> Be wary of the Soekris net6501, I bought three of the 1.6Ghz net6501-70
>>> model which has an Atom E-680 cpu (E series) and it compiles more 
>>> than twice
>>> as slow as a 1.6Ghz Atom N270 in an older netbook.  Someone else 
>>> running
>>> Linux reported similar CPU slowness.  As far as practical network
>>> throughput, I could only get 100Mbit/sec with a simple HTTP download 
>>> of a
>>> file full of zeros, and OpenVPN could only push about 25Mbit/sec.  As a
>>> practical example of the CPU slowness, it takes about 1.5 minutes to 
>>> compile
>>> pkg on the N270 netbook and 5 minutes on the 6501 (around 4.5 if I 
>>> use -j2).
>>> A kernel compile took an hour. Unfortunately I had no idea this CPU
>>> (possibly implementation?) was so slow before I purchased it, and I 
>>> could
>>> scarcely find evidence of it on google after hours of searching when 
>>> I had
>>> already discovered the issue.  I was hoping to find some comparative
>>> benchmarks between various Atom series but manufacturers generally 
>>> don't do
>>> that.
>>>
>>> Additionally, the total AHCI SATA write speed on the net6501 (in BSD 
>>> only?)
>>> has a strange 20MB/sec limitation but reads can go over 100MB/sec.  
>>> If I
>>> write to one disk I get 20MB/sec, if I write to both SATA disks I get
>>> 10MB/sec each.  Write is equally slow on a SSD.  Both someone running
>>> OpenBSD and I running FreeBSD reported the same symptoms to the 
>>> soekris-tech
>>> mailing list and received no useful replies towards getting that 
>>> problem
>>> solved.  I tested the write speed briefly with Linux and it did not 
>>> appear
>>> to have the 20MB/sec limitation.  I did confirm it was using 
>>> MSI(-X?) with
>>> boot -v.  I think this hardware would need to fall into Alexander 
>>> Motin's
>>> hands to get anywhere with debugging the SATA speed issue. Since it 
>>> seems
>>> fine in Linux, maybe some day it can be fixed in BSD but I have no 
>>> clue how
>>> that limitation could happen.  The disks I tested with are fine in 
>>> normal
>>> computers.
>>>
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>