DMA Problem

jcoke · n00b Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 10

Greetings Gentoo Wizards! I seem to be having a problem with gentoo not allowing me to use dma on my drives after a reinstall. This is on my Toshiba Satellite 1805-S274 by the way. When I do a hdparm /dev/hda2 (my root partition) it comes up as being off. No big deal I thought, I run a hdparm -d1 /dev/hda2 and it tells me, "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Invalid argument"

Also, when I boot up it says: DMA DISABLED (BIOS) but the funny thing is, if I boot to the live CD or Knoppix, DMA is enabled just fine. This is after changing nothing at all in BIOS. Furthermore, there does not even appear to be any DMA option in my BIOS.

Yes, I enabled DMA support in my kernel (gentoo-sources 2.4.20). I went ahead and disabled all APM and ACPI to try and fix that performance mess. Is it possible that this has something to do with the problem? I'm going to recompile the kernel with just ACPI support for battery, AC adapter and toshiba extras, as was suggested in another thread.

So, anybody have any other suggestions?

pilla · Posted: Tue Apr 08, 2003 2:24 pm Post subject:

Try

jcoke · n00b Joined: 28 Mar 2003 Posts: 10

Thanks for the suggestion. The problem came down to me being up for too long and not paying close attention to my options in the kernel config

It seems that I enabled support for the chipset right next to mine in the menu (Mine is an ALi) and therefore I THOUGHT that I had enabled the correct chipset :roll:

After the third kernel recompile (which takes forever with DMA disabled) I noticed my glaring mistake and took care of it. Kernel compiles went from around 45 minutes down to 14. Needless to say, I'm feeling pretty dumb about now.

BTW, sorry about the double post. My net connection has been really screwy lately and I didn't think that the first one submitted, as it sent me to a nice 404 page.