OS6 now works on x86 Legacy WARNING: NO NTGR SUPPORT!

I've finally figured out what was causing my Ultra6 to constantly freeze. A huge thank you to ACTIS, who volunteered a device to test some theories. It turns out that it was very hard to reproduce on his system, since that device was equipped with faster disks (7200v5400 rpm), a whopping 8GB of ram and a proper dual core CPU (not an Atom).

The problems on the Ultra 6 turn out to be the following:

• BTRFS and Atom processors do not really play well together. It can run on an atom obviously, but the Atom isn't well suited to handle the amount of calculations BTRFS demands.


• The 1GB of RAM. Upgrading to 4GB made a massive difference in general load on the system, but still did not resolve the I/O wait spiking to near locking point.


• Snapshots. Snapshots are an incredible pain in the behind. Even with the creation of new snapshots disabled, btrfs was constantly checking against the last snapshot on a subvolume, causing significant load when multiple threads are simultaneously writing to the device.

After deleting the snapshots, device load peaked at 7 when downloading with 40 simultaneous threads, a par2 repair and an unrar, while Sickbeard and Couchpotato were moving files around. As an added bonus, after all the snapshots were gone, the admin UI was about 50 times faster when modifying a share or access to a share. Permission changes were suddenly done in a few seconds instead of several minutes (and in some cases, a frozen device).

I'm still seeing some performance fluctuations, but the device is stable, doesn't crash when looking at it funny and most importantly: my girlfriend no longer nags me daily about missing her series.

Again a big thank you to ACTIS for volunteering a device so I could test this. You're awesome.