I cannot turn DMA on in my harddrive

niben_s

Hi,

I am having problem with turning on DMA on my harddrive. I tried explictly setting it on using hdparm and it does not work.

I have AMD k6-2 533 MHz processor and VIA (VT8501??) chipset . I have the following configuration in kernel config settings:

Unne · l33t Joined: 21 Jul 2003 Posts: 616

After googling a bit, the answer I found is "hdparm is for drives, not partitions". Try using /dev/hda instead of /dev/hda3. I get the same errors as you if I try to hdparm a partition instead of a drive.

pYrania · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:13 pm Post subject:

in addition to the false execution of hdparm, it needs to be said, that not all harddisk support it.

you may check this with
$ cat /proc/ide/hda/settings
_________________
Markus Nigbur

niben_s · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:19 pm Post subject:

Unne · l33t Joined: 21 Jul 2003 Posts: 616

I don't know the best way to do it, but I added a line to the end of /etc/conf.d/local.start . If there's a better way to do it, I'd love to know too.

lazarusrat · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:27 pm Post subject:

rc-update add hdparm boot
I think it only turns on DMA, so if there are other hdparm settings you want, just edit the /etc/init.d/hdparm script.

Unne · l33t Joined: 21 Jul 2003 Posts: 616

Oh, nice. Can't believe I missed that.

niben_s · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 3:47 pm Post subject:

pYrania · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 4:02 pm Post subject:

i think you cannot. it's way before init parses your startup scripts

hm. you could modify /sbin/rc, but there's no need to do so

_________________
Markus Nigbur

lazarusrat · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 4:10 pm Post subject:

I think that would be the checkroot and/or checkfs scripts running before the hdparm script.
I've been wondering about that one myself.

You can't just rc-update del checkroot/checkfs, because they're depended on by other scripts. So possibly remove them from the "depend()" section of the scripts that depend on them (I think localmount is one)? This assumes you're okay not having fsck run on boot at all.

Or possibly add "need hdparm" to the "depends()" section of checkroot/checkfs?

I'm not really sure how well either of these solutions will work. I haven't had the chance to try either of them myself yet, because it's not an issue on my box (my chipset has automatic DMA support), but it is on my roomie's.

lazarusrat · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 4:20 pm Post subject:

Oh, also there is apparently a /etc/conf.d/hdparm now? I don't think there was such an animal last time I messed with this stuff, so that's probably a better place to do the configuring.
I kind of skimmed over your kernel settings before. There's a setting in there somewhere for Enable DMA by default (or something like that). Have you got that compiled in? If not, give that a try, and if it works the whole init script thing won't be an issue anymore.

niben_s · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 4:29 pm Post subject:

lazarusrat · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 4:33 pm Post subject:

Sixth or so post in this thread: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=59619&highlight=hdparm+fsck

niben_s · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 4:58 pm Post subject:

lazarusrat · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 7:00 pm Post subject:

Hm.
My only other suggestion (besides fiddling with the init script dependencies which may or may not be a good idea) would be to pass hdparm the -k1 option. I think that's the right one. man hdparm, it's the "keep" flag that's supposed to tell your drive to keep settings across power cycles.

After this, it's basically EOF on my knowledge of the situation.

marrs · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2003 Posts: 10

After adding support for the correct chipset on my motherboard in the same area of the kernel's menuconfig, DMA was finally turned on automatically.

niben_s · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 8:16 pm Post subject:

puggy · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2003 9:35 pm Post subject:

Moving to Hardware & Laptops

Puggy
_________________
Where there's open source , there's a way.