Re: Dell XPS gen 3 trouble
On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 21:54:24 +0100
Søren Boll Overgaard <boll+debian@fork.dk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> After struggling with the onboard sata controller, on my brand new
> Dell XPS gen 3 at work, I finally got Debian booted and installed,
> using debian-installer rc2. Unfortunately, a few kinks remain to be
> ironed out:
Disclaimer: I'm not a Dell expert, but I am using a SATA drive with my
NForce2 motherboard currently.
> 1) The Dell XPS comes with two 160 GB sata drives, which are only
> usable from Linux when configured for pata access[1]. I have been
> unable to enable DMA[2] on the disks, which is obviously detrimental
> to performance. Any suggestions as to how to accomplish this would be
> greatly appreciated.
What makes you say they're configured for pata access? Did you have to
change bios settings for d-i to see them? Are you using raid? (If so,
almost all sata raid controllers built into motherboards are really a
sneaky way of using software raid, which requires additional
configuration in Debian.)
The dmesg excerpt you mention below does not convince me it sees the
drives as pata instead of sata, as all 2.4 kernels assign hd* devices to
sata drives, in my understanding. I also didn't see what kernel version
you are running (assuming it's not 2.6.9, since you mention boot
problems with that version).
> 2) I am unable to boot the latest 2.6 kernel[3] as distributed in
> debian unstable. The boot proceeds nicely, until detecting the second
> disk, after which it just sits there. No kernel panic, nothing, it
> just sits there. The keyboard is still active (ie. anything typed
> appears on screen) but nothing happens.
I've had the best success with a 2.6.7 kernel from Debian packages.
2.6.8 didn't fully load the modules I needed (ps/2 mouse) and I've not
tried 2.6.9 (running Sarge).
Also, if you really are using a 2.4 kernel during installation and then
trying to boot the 2.6.9 kernel from unstable, that is probably the
cause of your problem. 2.6 kernels label sata drives with a /dev/sd*
device and 2.4 kernels use /dev/hd*. This will cause a sudden stop when
it reads your /etc/fstab file and only sees references to /dev/hda
which now looks like a non-existent device.
> I've been googling for answers quite a bit, but it seems the XPS gen 3
> is still too new for anything useful to have been indexed.
>
> [1]
> from dmesg:
> hda: attached ide-disk driver.
> hda: 312581808 sectors (160042 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=19457/255/63
>
> [2]
> # hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
>
> /dev/hda:
> setting using_dma to 1 (on)
> HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
> using_dma = 0 (off)
What does "hdparm /dev/hda" report? Using 2.6.7 kernel, it doesn't even
tell me if udma is on or off and errors out similar to yours when I tell
it to enable it. Nevertheless, hdparm -t /dev/sda and hdparm -T /dev/sda
report pretty good speeds for me:
# hdparm -t /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 158 MB in 3.08 seconds = 51.29 MB/sec
# hdparm -T /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1024 MB in 2.00 seconds = 511.31 MB/sec
> [3]
> 2.6.9-1-386
It won't make the difference between booting or not booting, but you'll
probably get better performance from a kernel ending in one of the
following instead of -386:
-k7
-686
-686-smp
To find out which you need, use "apt-cache show
kernel-image-2.x.xx-version" to read the details.
HTH,
Jacob
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