Re: ASUS motherboard
Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu> writes:
> |> I got my P4S533 in July. Great and stable board! The onboard LAN and
> |> sound is supported in standard marcello kernels, but you'll need a
> |> newer -ac kernel (I use 2.4.20-pre8-ac2), if you want to be able to
> |> use NVIDIA's 3D accel. drivers via AGPGART. Finally I can play
> |> UT2003demo on my P4S533. ;)
> |>
> |> The 2.4.20-pre8-ac2 also gave me UDMA support for the SIS5133 onboard
> |> IDE controller. With a standard 2.4.18 kernel (not supporting SIS5133)
> |> I only got 3 MB/sec for disk reads (tested with hdparm -tT). With the
> |> new 2.4.20-pre8-ac2 and UDMA enabled I get 46 MB/sec.
>
> Wow, thank you---this is incredibly useful information. Just in time
> too, since I'm about to do the install and configuration on this
> machine.
>
> 3D acceleration is not an issue, since this machine is destined to be
> a (small) departmental server and will never run X.
>
> The difference between 3 MB/sec and 46 MB/sec for disk reads is quite
> spectacular though.
>
> Can I ask two questions?
>
> 1. Is the 2.4.20-pre8-ac2 kernel sturdy enough to function as the
> kernel for a server (mail and web mainly, about 30 users)?
>
> 2. Would you be willing to share the config file you used to get UDMA
> support?
I had a similar problem with my new ASUS A7V333. The 2.4.18 kernel's
IDE driver does not support disk DMA through the VIA 8233a SouthBridge
chip. You may want to check if your board has that chip, too.
The solution was to install kernel-image-2.4.19-k7 from testing.
After that, hdparm was able to enable DMA for the disk. This improved
throughput from 7 MB/s to as much as 45 MB/s.
--
Jack O'Quin
Austin, Texas, USA
http://www.stellajazz.com
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