Knoppix 7.6.1 runs my old hardware better than Debian

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02-23-2016, 02:24 AM
jimz93

Knoppix 7.6.1 runs my old hardware better than Debian

Hello folks, I am still have a ways to go on learning the ins and outs of linux. I have been experimenting on a very old PC with Debian Jessie and also Knoppix. Knoppix rocks BTW. Not sure if this question is best in this forum but I will give it a shot. Where Debian fails and Knoppix succeeds is in the hard drive performance. The hardware is a built in IDE controller on the motherboard (VIA 82C686A) and there are 2 PATA hard drives, one runs pretty well under both OS's the other there is just a world of difference. With Debian I get lots of DMA errors and soft resets. As far as I can tell it is not a hardware prob as the hardware works correctly with WinXP and Knoppix. So I have been researching and tried everything I can imagine even built some kernels trying to duplicate the kernel configuration of knoppix with 4.26, 4.3, and 4.4 source still can't get it working with my regular linux installation. An lspci -v indicates pata_via is the module used for the controller in both Linux's. I don't see any special boot commands other than libata.force=noncq being used, and that does not result in the desired performance on the Debian install. I am taking about almost 2 times better performance with knoppix. Its a little hard for me to tell what the kernel is doing under knoppix since the hard drive / scsi subsystems are built-in on the kernel (and I don't know how to figure it out, lol)

Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

J.
02-23-2016, 03:15 PM
dwstarke

... As far as I can tell it is not a hardware prob as the hardware works correctly with WinXP and Knoppix. .... I am taking about almost 2 times better performance with knoppix. ...

Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

Use Knoppix?
02-23-2016, 04:01 PM
jimz93

Quote:

Originally Posted by dwstarke

...

Use Knoppix?

That was humorous, lol, but not too helpful. I do use knoppix as my live cd. The machine in question is set up as a firewall/NAT router and I want to have a regular full installation on it. And besides, I am on a mission. Not giving up, no sir, lol. So I am going to add all the modprobe conf info from knoppix next.
02-24-2016, 08:19 PM
jimz93

After doing some more looking under the hood of knoppix, I now believe the better hdd performance is due to it using the BFQ I/O scheduler instead of CFQ or because it loads the open-iscsi driver, or both. Going to check those out. :)
02-25-2016, 12:35 AM
Capricorny

Quote:

Originally Posted by jimz93

That was humorous, lol, but not too helpful. I do use knoppix as my live cd. The machine in question is set up as a firewall/NAT router and I want to have a regular full installation on it. And besides, I am on a mission. Not giving up, no sir, lol. So I am going to add all the modprobe conf info from knoppix next.

I have used remastered Knoppix with Poor Man's HD Installs for all kinds of servers for years, never been able to understand the need for regular full installations when performance isn't critical - and Knoppix often performs pretty well. For server use, I have often run without persistent store, with all necessary configurations in the cloop/squashfs image.