Re: Hmm, IDE DMA seems broken with Etch on my PWS433a (Miata MX5).
On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 05:02:14PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> Well there are apparently dip switch settings for 600MHz (after all
> there was a PWS600a I believe). The cpu is in a nice ZIF socket, so no
> problem getting it in and out. I would have to find the right wrench to
> move the heat sink over (I love the bolt on heat sink design. How
> neat).
>
> Not sure about the daughter card bit. Hmm. The only other part of the
> mainboard that seems removable is the 2MB L3 cache module.
>
> OK, I wasn't sure about that one yet.
>
> Does booting the installer with 'ide=nodma' seem likely to work until I
> can rebuild the kernel with one of the patches to avoid the DMA bug?
So the answer to 'ide=nodma' is that for some reason the cmd64x driver
doesn't even look at any boot options and always enables DMA. That kind
of sucks.
My solutions was to go through the installer to just before the
partition tool where networking is setup, return to the menu, load
additional installer features, and install the ssh client. I then scp'd
the hdparm binary (from the hdparm udeb I extracted on another machine),
and ran it to disable dma on the hd. After that the install when just
fine. I then chroot'd to /target, and installed hdparm and configured
/etc/hdparm.conf to disable dma on the hd on boot. System boots fine
with no errors now. I guess the early miatas require a modified kernel
to fix the DMA bug in the cmd64x driver. I am surprised this has never
made it into the kernel yet. I guess most people run scsi drives on
these machines.
--
Len Sorensen
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