Floppy too slow with Mandriva 2006 [solved]

[jeanmm]

Hello,

 

I noticed that writing to floppy has become really slow in Mandriva 2006 : 32 KB written every 30 seconds only. The same problem was observed on 4 different PC's, so it seems to be a real problem related to Mandriva 2006 (and the same test on my PC started with 2005LE shows that there is no problem with the floppy drive or other hardware).

 

In fact, until now I don't know if it's a general problem, or if it works on some PC's. So if someone can also perform a test, in order to compare, it would be interesting.

 

Thanks for any advice or suggestion.

;)

 

Moved from Software by theYinYeti. Welcome aboard :)

Edited November 14, 2005 by jeanmm

[jeanmm]

I noticed that irq 6 is not set (nothing in /proc/interrupts), and nothing related to floppy in /proc/ioports.

Module floppy was not started either, but "modprobe floppy" does not initialize irq 6. Some idea ?

How does start floppy in 2005LE ?

thanks

[jeanmm]

It looks as if another driver is in charge of the floppy unit. Is there a tool to find out the name of this driver, and then to tweek it ?

I made some tests with dd and rsync instead of cp : the speed is nearly the same, about 10 times slower than in Mandriva 2005LE !

[jeanmm]

It looks as if another driver is in charge of the floppy unit.

In fact no, the floppy driver is unique, but starts only at first copy to/from floppy. I also established that both drivers (2005LE and 2006) have the same parameters (as given by ""floppycontrol -p", a utility contained in fdutils package).

[Guest dshmmdv]

I have the same problem with the 2006.0 release.

10.1 is OK on the same hardware.

It seems that the writes to the floppy will finish and diff

OK but it is very slow on writes.

[jeanmm]

I have the same problem with the 2006.0 release.

10.1 is OK on the same hardware.

For me it was OK from 9.2 to 10.2, and now, unexpectedly, there are lots of PC's which do not work properly !

In fact I didn't see a single PC with usual Floppy write speed with Mandriva 2006

[pmpatrick]

It might be a supermount problem. The floppy is the only thing that still uses supermount in mandriva. You might try disabling supermount and manually mount the floppy drive to see if the speed improves. It might also be that kat thing.

[jeanmm]

It might be a supermount problem. The floppy is the only thing that still uses supermount in mandriva. You might try disabling supermount and manually mount the floppy drive to see if the speed improves. It might also be that kat thing.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hello,

 

I tested without supermount : the result is the same. I removed kat and libkat from the beginning, when I realized that it needs too much resources.

 

I also made a new kernel, with floppy driver source coming from 2005LE, but the result is the same.

 

I also made a test with Knoppix 4.0, which has the same kernel as Mandriva 2006 (and I suppose the same floppy driver) : the measured write speed is not 1, nor 10, but 25 KB/s !

 

My conclusion is : there must be something wrong inside Mandriva 2006, not necessarily the floppy driver itself, but something else ...

 

Any other suggestion ?

thanks

Edited November 13, 2005 by jeanmm

[jeanmm]

I finally tried to post a bug in Mandriva's bugzilla, and got immediately following answer :

 

That's because the floppy is now mounted with 'sync' as default...

If you want the speed back, change in /etc/fstab the line regarding /mnt/floppy from ...,sync,... to ...,dirsync,...

You will only get a little bit longer umount as the kernel flushed the writes to the floppy... but the overall total speed is faster that way...

 

I tried this solution, and it works : now writing to floppies is really faster, BUT, it's very important not to remove a floppy without unmounting it first. In fact, without former supermount it's now very important to perform systematically mount/unmount. I noticed that mount/unmount options exist at user's level with a right click on the floppy icon in the new devices window.

;)

 

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