Hi,
On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Dieter Jurzitza wrote:
Hi guys,
this is an issue I rose around October timeframe with my U60, this is
what
SuSE does and this is what makes total sense (to me):
start with ide=nodma as default setting, check what your system can
cope with
and activate dma later. I have seen severe filesystem corruption due the
malconfiguration regarding dma.
I understand that you can turn DMA on and off on the running system
using hdparm (perhaps the /proc/ide interface as well), but how do you
make sure (other than empirically) that it will work properly once
activated? I presume that you are talking about the 2.4.x kernel, have
you ever tried 2.6? According to Joshua Kwan its IDE driver works
somewhat better.
I honestly do not understand why people do (debian sarge does) it the
other
way round. A stable system should be the primary target, after that
the dma
configuration may easily be adjusted.
Perhaps because this opinion was not voiced before?
The debian installer could come with some tests that check for the
proper dma
configuration interactively.
As turning the DMA off while booting requires passing the command-line
arguments to the kernel, installer does not have any control over it
whatsoever. The only thing we could do (short of hacking the driver in
the kernel) is to document this workaround in the installer's manual
for sparc. Any other ideas?