Jan Gutter wrote: > and the hard drive just uses PIO. With libata, it hangs up randomly, > causing the driver to eventually clock down to PIO mode too. I have a new Acer 5614WSMi with similar timeouts, and although it has a different model PATA hard drive, the PATA cdrom is the same model and firmware version, and it seems to be the cdrom that is timing out. When I migrated my gentoo install over, the first kernel I tried was 2.6.18 with both the IDE PIIX driver (manually added the ICH7M pci id to get DMA) and libata and I got timeouts on both drivers. I'm now using libata on kernel: 2.6.19-gentoo-r2 which is based on mainline 2.6.19.1 and am still getting timeouts. At first I noticed that the timeouts stop if I don't have any programs running (like hald) that regularly query the cdrom. Then I had a look at the hald source code to find out which commands might be causing the timeouts. I wrote a simple test program that just opens the cdrom with "O_RDONLY | O_NONBLOCK" then immediately closes it and loops every second and it triggered a timeout after a few hours. Then I changed the delay to 4 seconds and still got a timeout after a while. If I change the test program to only open the cdrom once then continously execute a status command such as the CDROM_DRIVE_STATUS ioctl every second, the timeouts don't seem to occur. Hopefully this should help with finding the source of the problem. -- Matthew Stapleton - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
