How to get DMA working in Linux w. Seagate Serial-ATA Drives

[bananafury]

Will this work with a WD Raptor 10,000rpm sata drive?

[pier.3dnow]

10x anybody

the trick of echo max_kb_per_request:15 > /proc/ide/hde/settings worked for my wd1800jb eide with serille adaptor and the performance boost up from 2Mb/s to 36Mb/s (in windows I had maximum 29Mb/s )
anyway can you tell how to get the single drive patch pls?

[anybody]

I don't think there is any single drive patch yet.

It was just some speculation that it probably can be easily done by making a few changes to the siimage.c driver file in the kernel sources.

I don't really know C so i'm probably not the right one to do it. Anyone up to this ?

[pier.3dnow]

I don't think there is any single drive patch yet.

It was just some speculation that it probably can be easily done by making a few changes to the siimage.c driver file in the kernel sources.

I don't really know C so i'm probably not the right one to do it. Anyone up to this ?

something strange happens this morning with your tricks to enable dma, the system hang up I will try to upgrade the kernel (2.40.20-13.9) to a new one to see if something goes better with the dma

[leibold]

Anyone up to this ?

I was looking for anything obvious in siimage.[ch] and the only thing I found worth trying is the number of channels in siimage.h for the SIL3112A chip (change from 2 to 1). However, I haven't tried it.

[benfarrell]

hi I've just recently had the experence (or pain ) of setting up a7n8x-deluxe motherboard with Gentoo, so I thought I would share a few things.

I've only got one WD1200JB hard drive on a SATA->PATA converter, and its reconised as /dev/hde.

To get around the problem with the long pause, I added the following to /etc/lilo.conf:

Code: Select all

append = "pci=noacpi hdg=none"

If your using the nvidia network controller on this board the pci=noacpi seems to fix this driver crashing. The hdg=none tells the ide sub system to not probe hdg.

Also on the topic of DMA I found just using hdparm -d1 /dev/hde would cause the system to lock up however using hdparm -d1 -X69 /dev/hde seems to fix this problem

I am currently using hdparm -u1 -c1 -d1 -X69 /dev/hde and I get the following hardparm timings:

/dev/hde:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.24 seconds =533.33 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.45 seconds = 44.14 MB/sec

Cheers,
Ben

[leibold]

hdg=none The best fixes are the simple ones. Thanks!

Be careful with your DMA settings. There are known data corruption issues. The workaround is to reduce both speed (UDMA mode 2) and size of data transfers (max_kb_per_request = 15).

It sounds as if the latest ASUS bios (1004 for rev 1.x A7N8X boards) may contain a fix for this problem, but I'm not sure whether there are also driver fixes required.

[Savage1]

Wow, cool

I thought that I would not be able to use my sata converter in Linux, but this looks promising.

Now since I have installed already on IDE (hda), how would I get my install to recognise my new location on SATA (hde)?

Would I have to do a reinstall and is it worth it? I mean, is the performance that much better?

Thanks,

Lee.

[hachre]

The performance is very worth it...

Switching from /dev/hda to /dev/hde depends on your distribution.
Normally you just have to change the settings in your bootloader and the root=/dev/hdX parameter for your kernel...

Just change /dev/hda to /dev/hde in
/etc/lilo.conf (or similar)
/boot/grub/grub.conf (or similar)
/etc/fstab

this should do it on most distris.

[speedboy]

I agree I am also having problems with the settings nobody gave us to try. It crashes after a certain amount of data throughput. I am ditching these ATA drives and getting IDE ones. Pitty no one is writing a decent driver for this controller. :\