Re: K8N-E Deluxe: No DMA on IDE Disks

[Thomas Steffen <steffen.list.account@gmail.com>]

On 4/20/05, Jim Wiggs <jim.wiggs@gmail.com> wrote:
>    I have to admit ignorance.  What is the "DMA driver?" 

I ment the driver that does activate DMA, which should be the driver
for your specific IDE interface. The generic interface most likely
does not enable DMA.

So in your case, I would build amd74xx into the kernel. "IDE generic"
should not be needed, although it does not hurt either. "Use DMA by
default" is certainly a good choice. The only other option I can
imagine is to check the BIOS, sometimes the BIOS can do things the
drivers cannot (such as properly setting up DMA :-).
 
>    Another poster suggested adding amd74xx to the /etc/modules file
> *before* ide-generic, but this doesn't seem to make any difference.

I assume you boot of an initrd. So you may have to rebuild your
initrd. It should usually use the order of /etc/modules, although that
is not always guaranteed.

> On the stock AMD64 Sid install, which file controls what's going on in
> "module land:" /etc/modules or /etc/modprobe.d/aliases?  They seem
> to be redundant...

/etc/modules are loaded at bootup, or under some circumstances already
in initrd. /etc/modprobe.d/ is used to construct /etc/modprobe.conf,
which resolves autoloading. So if  a module is in /etc/modules, the
autoloading is never used.

Thomas