I seem to have exactly the same problem as Matthias. I didn't realize it
before I read Matthias' post and decided to try going back to Drew's
driver. Here's what I noticed:
On lightly loaded machine ncrB2L and Drew's drivers perform exactly the
same. When I started using X and use constantly around 10MB swap (16MB
memory), my system's performance went down greatly. I thought it was just
because of having too little memory and too many memory-hungry programs.
So I tried switching back to Drew's driver and lo, my system became a lot
more usable. Swapping stuff in and out is a lot faster and the disk seems
to make a lot less noice, i.e. it's not in use that much. I'd be happy to
do some further testing if told what to test. This is just what I noticed.
My hardware:
Amd486DX4/100, 128kB L2 cache, MG motherboard, 16MB memory
Noname-NCR810 board with Conner CFA540S attached to it (10MHz sync transfer)
Linux versions 1.3.92-97.
If there's something vital missing, just ask.
-- http://www.iki.fi/terje/