# Slow Terminal Switching



## poptart-on-rye (Jan 10, 2009)

Hello, I've just installed FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE on a new machine.  When I switch consoles via ALT-F*, it takes at least 30 seconds to switch over.  It does the same thing when I use scroll lock, or siwtch to a graphical environment.  Being that this is my first FreeBSD install I'm not sure where to start with trying to figure this out.

The machine is a MSI Wind barebones pc, with 1gb kingston ram.  I thought maybe I had installed the wrong ram so I booted into a Linux USB distro and ran a mem test program which returned fine.

Does anyone know what might be causing this?


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## mk (Jan 10, 2009)

i have little exp with one of those eee pc's.
that one use atom cpu and eeebunto, starting a terminal was nightmare to me (wait about 20sec?). overall slow machine.
did you tried with linux installed ? same when changing consoles?

p.s. oh.. another thing.. using freebsd under vmware on windows host i have similar problems.
when fast typing vmware console display with delay what i typed.scroll too.
what i change was kern.hz in /boot/loader.conf i put it to 100. default for 7.0 i 1000 (quote on ivan voras for the tip). so .. can be that too. 
try it


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## poptart-on-rye (Jan 10, 2009)

Yes, i booted into Slax linux off of a usb and it ran very fast.  i have an msi wind netbook as well, running ubuntu, and it's quite fast too.  This issue with it running slow exists only with FreeBSD.


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## trev (Jan 11, 2009)

I don't have the problem with FreeBSD 7-STABLE on an ASUS EEEPC 701 with 2Gb of RAM (40% of which is used for ramdisks) - takes under 2 seconds to switch console screens.


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## poptart-on-rye (Jan 12, 2009)

bump.  is it possible that i have the hardware configured wrong?  could that be causing this?


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## artificer (Jan 12, 2009)

Are you using the binary NVIDIA driver in X? I think it relates to some problems with slow console switching from X to console and vice versa. Try without it.


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## poptart-on-rye (Jan 21, 2009)

I don't believe that I am running that NVIDIA driver.  The machine is just a base install as I'm still quite new.

Unfortunately the problem isn't specific to switching from X to console, it's also very slow switching from console to console, ie ALT-F1 to ALT-F2 (ttyv0 to ttyv1).  It also occurs when I hit scroll lock to page up through the readout.

Is it possible I don't have the kernel configured correctly for the hardware?

Thank you for your response though, and I'm sorry it took me so long to respond, I didn't have the page set to notify me apparently.


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## poptart-on-rye (Jan 22, 2009)

Okay, I figured it out.  I turned off hyper threading in the BIOS and now everything is working fine.  FreeBSD has no hyper threading support?

Thanks for the help everyone.


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## Djn (Jan 22, 2009)

The general recommendation seems to be to disable hyperthreading, yes. It's detected and the scheduler will send jobs to the virtual cores - but all in all, it's not a notable performance increase. (Indeed, it might be a decrease, as you've just found out).


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## aragon (Jan 22, 2009)

I've had this problem on HP systems that have i8042 emulation enabled by default in the BIOS.

FreeBSD does support Hyperthreading, but it has to be enabled.  Either way, enabling hyperthreading in the BIOS shouldn't cause problems...


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## Anonymous (Jan 22, 2009)

poptart-on-rye said:
			
		

> Okay, I figured it out.  I turned off hyper threading in the BIOS and now everything is working fine.  FreeBSD has no hyper threading support?
> 
> Thanks for the help everyone.



Hyper threading works on my Asus P4P800 with 2GB RAM.


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