Hi, i'm having the same problem with 2.4.21 vanilla on a friends' pc. There is one maxtor HD connected to the Silicon Image SATA board (so no raid functionality is used) I've installed Debian using custom CDs and upgraded to unstable. The system itself runs fine, only HD performance is /very/ low. During woody installation you sometimes (like during mke2fs) could watch characters being painted on the screen in framebuffer line by line. The installed system worked ok, only very sluggish during high disk load. hdparm gave (with 32bit, unmasqirq, multcount, readahead) a performance of less than two MB per sec. Enabling DMA worked sometimes, increasing the performance to 50 MB/s. I had a very irritating effect i do not understand fully. I can only explain it with high disc load. I had set hdparm parameters in the shell and they worked fine. I then put these parameters in an init script and rebooted. When the init script is run automatically the system dies. But when i init to single-user and then run the script manually it works fine. Reproducible. I tired adding a "flush" before running hdparm, but it didn't help. The error message is similar (maybe the number is different) to blk: queue c0468b00, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff) mentioned in http://lkml.org/archive/2003/6/11/164/index.html In http://lkml.org/archive/2003/6/10/245/index.html Justin Cormack mentiones echo "max_kb_per_request:15" > /proc/ide/hdXX/settings as a known bug. Where do i find details about this one? A related question: since the machine has only one HD connected to the SATA controller, is there some way to disable the driver looking for hdg (second channel)? it takes quite long to find that there is no cable connected there. :-( Greetings, Erich Schubert P.S. the friend said windows dies on that machine after a couple of runs... it seems to have worse problems with that sata board. ;) Similar to the effect described in http://lkml.org/archive/2003/6/10/130/index.html -- erich@(mucl.de|debian.org) -- GPG Key ID: 4B3A135C (o_ Go away or i'll replace you with a very small shell script. //\ Humor sollte immmer dabeisein, auch bei Problemen. V_/_ - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
