[MPlayer-users] k62/500 / 256mb ram not enough for dvd-playback?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Thu, Apr 03, 2003 at 09:16:03AM +0200, Winner of tha face compo wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]

> D Richard Felker III wrote:
> > Actually, in your case, it may make it slower... Most Super7
> > motherboards (used with K6) have an idiotic design flaw where they
> > cannot cache memory above 128 megs, so your system would probably get
> > a lot faster if you dropped down at only 128 megs of ram instead of
> > 256.
> You've told this so many times that today I decided to investigate this.
> I have a VIA MVP3 chipset with 192Mb RAM.
> 
> A quick benchmark with different memory sizes (mem= option passed on boot)
> showed that I got a whooping 18% performance increase with 128Mb RAM:
> 
> 192Mb
> BENCHMARKs: VC:  10.920s VO:   6.664s A:   0.000s Sys:   0.494s =   18.078s
> 128Mb
> BENCHMARKs: VC:   8.620s VO:   6.221s A:   0.000s Sys:   0.476s =   15.317s
> 
> Using only 64Mb didn't make a difference (sigh).
> 
> Then I RTFMed a bit, looking for a kernel patch for this functionality.
> Fortunately, the kernel already contains a driver for this in its MTD
> subsystem: slram.o
> 
> With this driver it's possible to map any memory address to character and
> block devices (compile mtdblock.o and/or mtdchar.o).
> 
> /dev/mtd0:      character special (90/0)
> /dev/mtdblock0: block special (31/0)
> 
> Setting it up couldn't be simpler:
> modprobe slram map=DRAM,134217728,+0x04000000 (adds 64Mb RAM above 128Mb)
> mkswap, swapon, and ready: 128Mb physical plus 64Mb swap, and 18% faster
> MPlayer.

Wow, thanks for the info! It works great!

Rich