Laptop is napping

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
> Geoffrey Leach wrote:
>> On 03/28/07 11:17:33, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
>>> Geoffrey Leach wrote:
>>>> My new ASUS laptop periodically takes a 30 second or so nap. [snip]
> 
> I have a new laptop, from R-cubed Technologies.  They are using an ASUS
> motherboard in it.  I too am seeing these 30-second hangs, but only when
> I'm actively running Windows-XP Pro in a VM-Ware session (at least
> that's when I notice it).  They are causing SSH and my Windows VPN to
> drop the connections due to timeouts.
> 
> I've watched the speed of my disk drive drop from UDMA/133 all the way
> down to PIO0 (and it continues to try and drop from there, tho there is
> no place to go from there....)

Apparently, this is my *empty* DVD+-RW drive which is getting these
messages and timeouts.  I just got off the phone with R-cubed
Technologies, and their workaround for this problem is to put *any*
optical disk into the drive.  This removes the timeouts from happening,
and of course, when the drive *was* timing out, it was hanging the
entire SATA disk drive subsystem.  Now, with a disk in the drive, no
more hangs.  R-cubed claims this is a kernel bug (perhaps related to the
particular SATA chipset), and will be fixed in one of their kernels in
the near future.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)