OT: DMA troubles with Via KT600 chipset & hitachi hard drive

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 10:52, Tom Georgoulias wrote:
[...snip...]
> 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?

I believe you're correct. I have a number of KT600 boards on systems at
work, and Fedora Core 0.95 (plus current updates) works fine on all of
them with expected DMA support, whereas Red Hat Linux 9 did not. If you
hold off a few days and use BitTorrent to grab the Fedora Core 1 ISO
images you should be right as rain.
-- 
Paul W. Frields <paul at frields.com>