Hi, I recently purchased a Gigabyte i-Ram GC Ramdisk after reading some quite impressive reviews online. Getting the card up and running connected to a ST Lab A-223 Serial ATA PCI Card (sil3114 using sata_sil) with kernel 2.6.19.1 was quite easy, thanks guys! Access times on this thing are great, but I seem to be hitting some strange performance-issues when doing large reads/writes. "hdparm -t /dev/sda" gives me 80-82 MB/s on average and bonnie++ (see link to complete output below) confirms these results. My simple stdio C-program gives write-speeds of around 70 MB/s. Other people using this device report of read/write speeds constantly maxing out their SATA150 or PCI-bus. Is this my sil3114 being the bottleneck? Other devices on the PCI-bus? My general system (see link to the complete output of lspci and /proc/cpuinfo below)? Or is this some glitch in the iRam + sil3114 combination? I cannot manually enable DMA on this device, as "hdparm -d1 /dev/sda" fails with "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device", but from what I can tell from dmesg (U)DMA should be enabled for this drive. I have tried enabling UDMA/133 for the controller (in sata_sil.c), giving this output on boot: libata version 2.00 loaded. sata_sil 0000:03:03.0: version 2.0 ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:03:03.0[A] -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 17 ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xD081AC80 ctl 0xD081AC8A bmdma 0xD081AC00 irq 17 ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xD081ACC0 ctl 0xD081ACCA bmdma 0xD081AC08 irq 17 ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xD081AE80 ctl 0xD081AE8A bmdma 0xD081AE00 irq 17 ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xD081AEC0 ctl 0xD081AECA bmdma 0xD081AE08 irq 17 scsi0 : sata_sil ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310) ata1.00: ATA-7, max UDMA/133, 1048319 sectors: LBA ata1.00: ata1: dev 0 multi count 16 ata1.00: Drive reports diagnostics failure. This may indicate a drive ata1.00: fault or invalid emulation. Contact drive vendor for information. ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 <snip> scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA GIGABYTE i-RAM v0.9 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 ...but this makes no noticeable difference from the default UDMA/100 mode. The test system is a pretty standard desktop computer from a few years back: CPU: Intel Pentium 4 - 2.4 GHz, 512 KB cache Mainboard: MSI 845G Max-L Memory: Apacer 256 MB PC2700 System disk: IBM IC35L040AVER07-0 40 GB 7200 RPM 8.5 MS SEEK TIME 2 MB BUFFER I'm using the old piix-driver (not libata) for the IBM-disk, as I was having some problems getting it to work with the libata-driver. I might try to fix it later on, but could this be what's causing the problems? The file system is ext3 both on the IBM disk and the i-Ram. On boot I get a message saying "The chipset may have PM-Timer Bug". I have tried setting acpi_pm_good=1 as a kernel parameter, but this made no difference. Complete output of dmesg/cpuinfo/bonnie/lspci/hdparm can be found here: http://nixx.no/oddbjorn/iram Could someone please shed some light on this? I hope I have provided enough information about the relevant hardware, if not; let me know and I'll post what I can find. Thanks! :) -- Regards Oddbjørn Kvalsund - 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
