Hello list members, Today I noticed that I was having a problem with CD burning. Basically, all I could burn were coasters. I am running Sarge with pretty much everything stock, except for a few backports (oo2, gphoto2, wx2.6 and a few Debian developer tools). I also have a custom compiled kernel, but I have been running the same kernel for about 8 months without issue. I burned about 8 coasters before it occurred to me to check my drive settings with hdparm. It turns out that I had something like this: roberto@miami:~$ sudo hdparm /dev/hdd /dev/hdd: IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit) unmaskirq = 0 (off) using_dma = 0 (off) keepsettings = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 8192 (on) HDIO_GETGEO failed: Invalid argument Of course, that made each burn get about 4 to 10 MB in and then completely fail. The error it gave was a "media error." The strange thing is that I also burned some DVD+RW and CD-RW without any hassle. I am guessing that the slower write speeds for those media didn't put too much strain on the system to keep up. Either way, I ended up having to do this to get back on track: roberto@miami:~$ sudo hdparm -c1 -d1 -u1 -a 8192 /dev/hdd /dev/hdd: setting fs readahead to 8192 setting 32-bit IO_support flag to 1 setting unmaskirq to 1 (on) setting using_dma to 1 (on) IO_support = 1 (32-bit) unmaskirq = 1 (on) using_dma = 1 (on) readahead = 8192 (on) This brings me to my question. Does anyone know of a way to get the system to notify me of any changes to the DMA status of the drives? On looking back in the syslog, I see this entry: Sep 24 17:38:16 miami vmunix: hdd: DMA disabled However, I am wondering if anyone knows of something to monitor for those sorts of changes and notify the user. Something like a console warning for programs that try to access the device, or a pop up window if the user is logged in to an X session. I can probably code something up, but I also don't want to reinvent the wheel. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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