need help

[Wes Shull]

"Gene C." <czar at czarc.net> wrote:

> come up with the answer ... pci=off nodma
[...]
> I do not understand why Red Hat and Fedora systems need this and the 
other 
> distributions do not -- Mandrake 9.2, Gentoo 1.4, SuSE 9.0, SuSE 
LivEval 
> (bootable cdrom), knoppix (Debian based bootable cdrom).
> 
> There is scant information in the kernel Documentation so I am not 
exactly 
> sure just what these boot parameters do.

Resources for kernel bootparams:
* man 7 bootparam (ancient, says 2.1.21 at the bottom!)
* kernel-parameters.txt in the kernel-doc package (I think that's what 
you're talking about above?)
* http://www.ibiblio.org/mdw/HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO.html

None of those explain the bare "nodma" but I seem to remember this 
coming up a lot around the time that FC2T1 was released (I'd search 
the archives IF THE FREAKING SEARCH WORKED)...  IIRC it disables use 
of DMA for (at least) ATAPI CD-ROM drives, some of which freak out or 
return corrupt data when using DMA.  Apparently nodma was the default 
in FC1 and earlier installers, and other distros...  forgot if it was 
accidental or intentional that FC2T1 wasn't the same.

I'm sure that if anything I said above was incorrect someone will jump 
in and set things straight ;-)

-- 
Redhat-types, why isn't the archive search working?  If you guys don't 
have time to fix it, I'm sure someone here can do it for you...