That's more like what we were expecting!

I can't tell you why its like that or how, but this *is* the typical
problem with IDE. Most likely the chipset is being detected incorrectly,
or its being detected correctly but there is some errata that's
disabling dma, or maybe dma is experimental for the card.

Places to look for information are in the dmesg for the sis chipset's
detection diagnostics, then on the internet as a google for your sis
chipset number then "linux dma" maybe. You may end up with some ide
things on your kernel command line (via grub or lilo)

I'll reiterate something I said previously though, other than
write-caching (which is potentially dangerous) none of the other hdparm
or IDE settings are really going to give you that much of a boost unless
your workload is specifically tunable. They're all just little minor
twiddles you can do - nothing even close to the difference between
having DMA or not. So I'd just focus on enabling DMA. The other stuff is
all uninteresting compared to it.

-Mike

Jay Strauss wrote:

Hi (again):

I diff'ed the contents of /proc/ide of Knoppix and Sarge, there were a
couple of (possibly) interesting differences.  I'm not sure how to go
about changing the settings.  The net/net is on my controller under
knoppix it says UDMA Enabled but on Sarge it's disabled.  Also the
writecache is enabled under knoppix (I did a hdparm -W 1 /dev/hda, but
my tests were identical)

Below are the diffs,  I'd like to make the sarge install setting
identical, and see if that changes anything.

If anyone knows how to alter these settings, I'd be appreciated

thanks
Jay

jstrauss@hydrogen:~$ diff -r sarge.ide/sis knoppix.ide/sis
10,11c10,11
<                 UDMA Enabled                   UDMA Enabled
<                 UDMA Cycle Time    2 CLK       UDMA Cycle Time    4 CLK
---

quoted

                UDMA Disabled                          UDMA Disabled
                UDMA Cycle Time    Reserved    UDMA Cycle Time Reserved

and
jstrauss@hydrogen:~$ diff sarge.ide/hda/settings knoppix.ide/hda/settings
7a8

quoted

breada_readahead        8               0               255    rw

9c10
< current_speed           68              0              
70              rw
---

quoted

current_speed           12              0               70    rw

11c12,13
< init_speed              68              0              
70              rw
---

quoted

file_readahead          124             0               16384    rw
init_speed              12              0               70    rw

16c18,19
< multcount               0               0              
16              rw
---

quoted

max_kb_per_request      128             1               255    rw
multcount               16              0               16    rw

20a24

quoted

slow                    0               0               1    rw

23c27
< wcache                  1               0              
1               rw
---

quoted

wcache                  0               0               1    rw

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