OT: DMA troubles with Via KT600 chipset & hitachi hard drive
Last night I was helping a friend get a new system set up with Red Hat
Linux 9 and noticed a problem that I was wondering if Fedora Core 1 will
resolve. It seems kinda pointless to download fc1 test 3 and try it at
this moment in time, when the general release is just around the corner
and we're very likely to migrate to that. So I thought I'd ask for
advice first.
While copying some RPMs from a CD to the hard drive, I noticed the copy
took a really long time and ran "hdparm -Tt /dev/hda" to see what the
transfer speeds were. The buffered disk reads were somewhere in the
neighborhood of 7MB/s, which lead me to believe DMA wasn't on. hdparm
and dmesg confirmed that. I tried turning DMA on with hdparm to do some
more testing, but I got the error:
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
We're running the latest RHL9 kernel, 2.4.20-20.9, a Hitachi 60GXP
Deskstar drive, and using ATA-133 compatible cabling. My suspicion is
the motherboard, a Gigabyte 7VT600-L based on the Via KT600. I'm not
sure if the kernel we are using has support for a motherboard this new.
Searching Google produced quite a few hits, but most were pretty old
and all seemed to suggest that IDE driver support was lacking in those
instances. So my question is, will the new Fedora Core 1 kernel have
the support we need to get DMA working on this setup?
Thanks,
Tom
--
Tom Georgoulias
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