[ Thanks to Ken
Treis for this link. ]
“Back when we revisited Socket A boards (and weren’t able to get
UDMA100 working), we promised you that we’d let you know when there
was something to report from the UDMA100-on-686B front. Well, now
there’s something to report. Look out, Abit KT7: Vojtech Pavlik has
released version 3.18 of his driver for VIA 82cxxx IDE controllers,
and it includes native support for the 686B southbridge. While it’s
not in the 2.4 tree yet (as of 2.4.1-test10), it’s easy to put it
there by hand and build yourself a screaming IDE interface on one
of the 686B boards. Read our article for build instructions and
benchmarks….”
“It’s difficult to measure real-world performance on a disk
drive for a couple of reasons. First, the Linux buffer cache stores
a good chunk of the drive’s contents in memory. Second, disk
benchmarks tend to read or write large blocks of data at a time —
a scenario that doesn’t match real-world disk usage….”
“The presence of this driver shows, once again, that running
Linux doesn’t have to mean that you’re behind the curve on your
hardware. If it did, we wouldn’t have much to talk about here on
Signal Ground. :)”