Guest Anton Posted December 11, 2002 Report Share Posted December 11, 2002 Hello all, this will be somewhat of a long post because I have a lot of details to share. Lets start with my hardware. I have an ECS P4S5A/DX motherboard with a Celeron 1.7 ghz proc. These Motherboards have an SIS 645/DX+ and 962L chipset. Upon installing MD9 I noticed the install took much longer than with my last PC, which was obviously much slower since I had just upgraded. After the install finished, I did some hard drive speed comparisons with hdparm. I have an ATA 100 hard drive, the motherboard supports upto ATA 133. With my last motherboard (VIA 686 chipset) I would get roughly 22-25 megabytes (for clarity) per second. Now on the new motherboard I get a whopping 2.75 megabytes per second. Also, hdparm reports the drive is running in UDMA mode 5. I have a serious slowdown here. I watched the MD9 bootup (removed quiet from lilo.conf) and noticed the IDE chipset only gets recognized as a generic SIS 5513 (Im not sure of that number but it should be close to that) and never gets fully recognized as ATA 133 compatible or that it has a 645/dx+ chipset. I decided to try another distro (Redhat 8.0) and right off the bat (during the cd bootup sequence) I noticed a difference, the IDE controller gets recognized properly, as an SIS 645/DX ATA 133 Compatible controller (it still mentions something about sis 5513, but the last line states SIS 645/DX ATA 133). After the install for Redhat was finished, I ran HDPARM again and I get my full transfer speeds back (22-25 meg a sec.). I tried SuSe 8.1, it worked fine too. Just like RedHat. Then I tried Peanut, it worked too. Since Redhats Kernel is slightly older than what Mandrake uses, I didn't think it would help, but I tried to recompile to kernel from sources from kernel.org, but that didn't help. I have run out of ideas, but something in Mandrake is not detecting my IDE chipset correctly, I'd much prefer to stick using MD9, I love it, but the speeds are unbearable. Can anyone givee me some hints as to what may be the difference between MD and the other distro's? And possibly how to fix it? Thanks in advance to anyone who has information. Anton Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Anton Posted December 11, 2002 Report Share Posted December 11, 2002 This is from my Redhat install /var/log/dmesg. The key line is the 5th line down where it states SiS656 ATA 133 Controller, Mandrake never detects this....it just leaves it at a 5513. Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31 ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx SIS5513: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 15 SIS5513: chipset revision 0 SIS5513: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later SiS646 ATA 133 controller ide0: BM-DMA at 0xff00-0xff07, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA ide1: BM-DMA at 0xff08-0xff0f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA hda: WDC WD100BB-60AUA1, ATA DISK drive hdb: MAXTOR 6L040J2, ATA DISK drive hdc: HL-DT-ST GCE-8320B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive hdd: HITACHI DVD-ROM GD-7000, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 hda: 19541088 sectors (10005 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=1216/255/63, UDMA(100) hdb: 78177792 sectors (40027 MB) w/1819KiB Cache, CHS=4866/255/63, UDMA(133) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Anton Posted December 12, 2002 Report Share Posted December 12, 2002 Thanks for all the replies :( By default MD9 is turning off DMA to all my IDE channels. Running hdparm fixed the problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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