sarge bug: if system drive sata, then pata drives slow and unable to set hdparms on pata ide devices
Hi,
I installed sarge using RC2 of the sarge debian installer on 2 different PC's
(asus K8V-x, motherboard, athlon 64, 1gb ram, VIA chipset for ide drives).
I am using the stock debian kernel (2.6.8-1-386, or 2.6.8-9-amd64 it makes no
difference).
One PC uses a SATA drive as system drive (sda), and one PC uses a parallel ata
(/dev/hda) ide drive as system drive.
I have additional 4 parallel ata 250GB drives on each machine for storage.
I noticed that for the PC with the system drive a SATA drive, then all the
hdparms are turned off for the parallel ide drives. The parallel ide drives are
really slow. (dma is off, IO support is 16bit etc).
However for the PC with system drive parallel ATA, the hdparms for the parallel
ata ide drives all optimized - ie
using_dma =1 , IO support is 32 etc. The drives are also nicely behaved when I
try to set up software raid (takes 1-2 hours to resync a raid1).
Moreover, when I install hdparm and try to run it, I get error message
my stuff> hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitte
using_dma=0 (off)
I searched on google, and often people say, you must make sure that the kernel
module (vt82cxxx for this chip set) is turned on for dma.
What is weird is that this module is clearly loaded in both of these systems.
And yet dma is turned off for the system with sata system drive.
Is dma turned off by the installer because of the fact that the sata system
drive doesnt need it? What do I need to do to get my hard drives working at
normal speed (ie same as other machine). It takes 10 hours to resync a 250 gb
raid1 at 2MB/sec which is intolerable (compared to other machine 1-2 hours...).
Thanks,
Mitchell Laks
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