NomadBSD extremely slow

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1

Hello there!

I’ve dd'ed the iso on a USB2 key then on a brand new UBS3 (a good one, Kingston Data Traveller 64 GB), both run very slow. Actually it lags regularly for minutes, making the use almost impossible. I’ve run it on 2 different computers, same problem. I’ve checked the sum, dd'ed the iso again with no luck. Also tried to use the 1.3.0 instead of 1.3.1, no luck either.

It looks like some process consuming a lot of CPU starts in the background and one has to wait its job is over before one can take control again.

I’ve tried the trick at boot described in the issues. Things seemed to go a little bit better (it lagged again at language choice, but after that, the install steps went on smoothly). But then I could not go graphical: the 3D acceleration lead to a grey screen for too long, and the VESA driver lead to the wallpaper + mouse pointer but nothing more (no right-click menu, no plank, no tint2).

It’s a shame because it looked so promising!!

A special problem has been a bad working wireless driver on one of the computers. The laptop has this stupid chipset I’ll care not to buy such any more. I know this driver needs some more packages to install and even some compilation (I could make it work on vanilla FreeBSD). It’s the bwn one. There. When loading only bwn (without the required additional stuff) from start, it triggers a lot of error messages. On the computer using this chipset, I could not start the graphical environment at all. When getting at the graphics card choice (or driver, I don’t remember), the screen got rapidly flooded by these error messages. The second time, I was expecting it so I did select and confirmed the choice rapidly, but after several minutes, OpenBox was still not there (only these error messages in text mode). So, as I guess it would be too much to embed the additional drivers (maybe it would also be the same problems with rights, that lead FreeBSD to not distribute them?), but maybe it would be wiser to not load bwn at all at start, to avoid such error messages flood?

Well I’m disappointed to not be able to use NomadBSD. Hope a future release will fix these problems?

2

Where did you get the ISO?

“Since NomadBSD is designed to be a persistent system, we do not provide ISO files, as ISO-9660 is a read-only filesystem.”

3

Oh yes, sorry, these were img files, not iso ones. I used the command line from the download page.

4

Hi there @zezollo,

your performance problem is most likely caused by a bad USB flash drive.

5

I did it the same way with dd for a NomadBSD 32bit for my old eeePC. It works well and fast enough. And I used an old USB flash drive, which had seen many, many OS’ses.
Perhaps it depends on your flash drive.

6

Well I don’t know, I’ve tried on 2 different keys, one USB2 32 GB and one USB3 64 GB and both had the same problems. The USB2 is not new, but the USB3 is a brand new Kingston Data Traveler, what should be a good brand.Maybe I’ll buy another one to try again, hoping this time it will work.

7

You could try a Linux live system (e.g. Tails) on your USB key(s) for a comparison.

1 Like
8

USB2 on itself is slow

9

I’ve installed slax and it runs normally.
I can’t imagine where the difference does come from. Maybe there’s something wrong somewhere on the flash drive, NomadBSD maybe constantly tries to fix it and Slax ignores it?

Could zero it (via dd) be of any help?

10

Yes, but problem was the same as on USB3 key.

In the meanwhile I’ve installed NomadBSD on another USB3 key, an older and smaller one but almost not used at all and it runs well on it. I appreciate it a lot. I am math teacher and at school all computers run Windows. So anytime we run them (that’s most of the time) we run an advertisement for Microsoft. I have no control on which OS are installed there. So I’ll try to run a free OS from a USB key. I thought it would be a Linux, but NomadBSD may do! I’d be very pleased. I could install some required softwares. I hope it’ll run fast enough so I can switch quickly from a Windows to NomadBSD. Hope the multiscreen will work fine. The defaults of NomadBSD are actually excellent (even the icon theme is good and that’s an important point: it’ll look better than Windows).

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11

Probably this is FreeBSD bug, please look at:

Writing to a USB 3.0 stick is very slow

12

I haven’t had any issue with USB3 speed on a USB to MiniCard adapter I did however have horrible speeds on a second USB adapter which didn’t get more than 6-9MB/s never really investigated as to why as the other one works fine.

13

Thanks, but I’m not sure, since it seems to work on one stick and not the other. Both USB3.

14

Well I’ve made the install steps on an old laptop instead of my desktop. The USB3 stick that works on the old laptop does not work on the desktop (I don’t know if it is also extremely slow: after choosing “automatically detect graphics driver”, then the wallpaper shows up, then the mouse pointer after a while, then nothing for a few minutes and as I didn’t have much time to wait, I had to press on “power off” and the normal shutdown was started and accomplished).

So I wonder if this could be a graphics driver problem. The desktop certainly requires the new drm-kmod package installed (and to load /boot/modules/i915kms.ko in /etc/rc.conf), while the laptop requires the drm-legacy-kmod.