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

[Jim Wiggs <jim.wiggs@gmail.com>]

   Mission accomplished!  I had to set a bunch of stuff under ATA
drivers to compile into the kernel before it would even *allow* me
to compile amd74xx as anything other than a module, but once
that was done, I got a kernel which booted and gave me DMA on
hda and hdc.

   I never reran mkinitrd after editing /etc/modules (didn't realize I
needed to -- I thought /etc/modules handled loading modules after
the root filesystem had been mounted up and /lib/modules was
available) so that might have fixed the problem as well, but I'm
not gonna poke this tiger any more.  Got it working, many thanks
for all the help!

best,
Jim

On 4/20/05, Thomas Steffen <steffen.list.account@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>