Bug#292190: cannot enable DMA on nForce2 chipset

[Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>]

Package: kernel-image-2.6.8-1-k7
Version: 2.6.8-10
Severity: normal

I have a motherboard with an nForce2 chipset (ASUS A7N8X Deluxe).  Using
the stock Debian kernel, I cannot enable DMA on the /dev/hda hard disk.

# hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

gives

HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted

As I have learned through googling, the problem appears to be that the
driver for this chipset (amd74xx) is loaded too late when the generic
IDE driver has already taken control of the hard disk.  I was able to
get it working by recompiling the kernel with amd74xx and everything it
depends on as a static part (not a module).  I don't think this is the
normal solution, though.  I hope you can figure out a better way.  SuSE
8.2 gets this right out of the box, by the way.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-1-k7-nforce2 [the one I compiled myself]
Locale: LANG=de_DE@euro, LC_CTYPE=de_DE@euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15)

Versions of packages kernel-image-2.6.8-1-k7 depends on:
ii  coreutils [fileutils]         5.2.1-2    The GNU core utilities
ii  initrd-tools                  0.1.76     tools to create initrd image for p
ii  module-init-tools             3.1-rel-2  tools for managing Linux kernel mo

-- no debconf information