Linux Format forums

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

Marrea — Fri Nov 09, 2007 8:09 pm

Author: Marrea

Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 8:09 pm

Well, I have finally given up on SUSE10.3 on my HP laptop. I have replaced it this evening with Gutsy Gibbon, which so far seems to be much better suited to the hardware. However, OOo Writer (2.3) has just crashed on me, so I hope that is not going to be a regular occurrence!

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

Marrea — Sat Oct 20, 2007 9:34 pm

Author: Marrea

Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2007 9:34 pm

Well, I'd been thinking that myself and was actually looking at that sdparm site last night. However, I couldn't see any command which tells you whether you have DMA enabled or not. I am in Fedora 7 on a five year old Evesham desktop at the moment, where the hard drive is shown as sda and my DVD ROM is /dev/scd0, and the hdparm commands don't seem to work properly on those either. Fortunately you can download sdparm from Fedora's Add/Remove Software, which I have just done. As far as I can see, the command sdparm -a /dev/sda [or /dev/scd0] doesn't seem to reveal anything about DMA.

I have xine and libdvdcss installed in Fedora. xine-check reported:

[ hint ] Your DVD drive seems not to be attached via ATAPI.
This might be due to the use of an ide-scsi emulation.
If you really have a SCSI DVD drive, your SCSI controller is likely
to do perfect DMA, so there's no reason to worry about this.
However, if you're using ide-scsi, there is a chance that DMA is
disabled for the DVD drive. Moreover, I don't know how to enable
DMA in that case, so you probably have to live with some performance
loss. (FIXME: check for /proc/ide, provide solution)

plus various OUCHES !! about missing plugins. However, DVDs play perfectly OK in xine in spite of these warnings.

In my googling about sdparm and dma I came across
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=61075
where mlord suggests that "If your disk is showing up as /dev/sda, then DMA is already enabled. No need to fiddle with it."

However the OP there says he has a SATA drive, whereas I don't. I am getting more and more confused about this by the minute.

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

nelz — Sat Oct 20, 2007 8:07 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Sat Oct 20, 2007 8:07 pm

If you are using drives through the SCSI layer, you may need sdparm instead.

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

Marrea — Fri Oct 19, 2007 5:54 pm

Author: Marrea

Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 5:54 pm

Results from hdparm -i /dev/sda and hdparm -i /dev/sr0 are as in my post of yesterday at 08:59 PM.

Results from hdparm /dev/sda etc below.

Code:

hdparm /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
HDIO_GET_UNMASKINTR failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_GET_KEEPSETTINGS failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 2432/255/63, sectors = 39070080, start = 0

hdparm /dev/sr0
/dev/sr0:
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
HDIO_GET_UNMASKINTR failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_GET_KEEPSETTINGS failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

hdparm /dev/cdrom
/dev/cdrom:
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
HDIO_GET_UNMASKINTR failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
HDIO_GET_KEEPSETTINGS failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

hdparm /dev/hda
/dev/hda: No such file or directory

hdparm /dev/dvd
/dev/dvd: No such file or directory

hdparm /dev/hdc
/dev/hdc: No such file or directory

This is how menu.lst describes the hard drive:

Code:

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title openSUSE 10.3 - 2.6.22.9-0.4
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.9-0.4-default root=/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_IC25N020ATCS04-_CSH204DMJ155PF-part1 vga=0x317 resume=/dev/sda2 splash=silent showopts brokenmodules=pata_ali
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.22.9-0.4-default

And this is from Xubuntu on the same laptop:

Code:

hdparm /dev/hda3
/dev/hda3:
multcount = 0 (off)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 38760/16/63, sectors = 17302005, start = 21768075

hdparm /dev/hdc
/dev/hdc:
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

All I'm really trying to find out is if there is any way of turning DMA on for my DVD drive in SUSE. Are the errors I'm getting perhaps something to do with hdparm not being compatible with drives which are labelled as sdx rather than hdx?

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

nelz — Fri Oct 19, 2007 1:54 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 1:54 pm

I was just following on from the /dev/hxx in Marrea's post. Having said that, PATA devices can still be /dev/dhX, it depends on whether you use the older or newer (and still marked experimental) ATA drivers.

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

Rhakios — Fri Oct 19, 2007 1:34 pm

Author: Rhakios

Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 1:34 pm

nelz wrote:

Use hdparm -i /dev/hdX or just hdparm /dev/hdX

Erm, shouldn't that be /dev/sdX nowadays?

However, looking back at Marrea's post, it seems she already knows that

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

nelz — Fri Oct 19, 2007 11:52 am

Author: nelz

Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 11:52 am

Use hdparm -i /dev/hdX or just hdparm /dev/hdX

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

Marrea — Fri Oct 19, 2007 10:37 am

Author: Marrea

Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 10:37 am

I thought hdparm –d /dev/hxx was the command to use to check whether DMA was on or not, and it would come back with either using_dma=0 (off) or using_dma=1 (on). And then if you discovered it was off, you used hdparm –d1 /dev/hxx to turn it on. And then to make it permanent you add a line at the bottom of the hdparm.conf file. I’m sure that’s what I did some time ago in one of my Ubuntu installs. But my SUSE 10.3 is obviously not responding to the command properly.

I'm on a different machine at the moment but will have a look at /var/log/messages and syslog when I'm back on the laptop.

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

nordle — Thu Oct 18, 2007 10:57 pm

Author: nordle

Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 10:57 pm

I'm still in windows, (hdparm -d ??), anyway, your drives appear to have the correct settings and should be super fast, >30MB/sec

Does /var/log/messages or syslog etc tell you anything vaguely appropriate?

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

Marrea — Thu Oct 18, 2007 9:07 pm

Author: Marrea

Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 9:07 pm

nordle wrote:

yep, nav is horrible, it used to be impossible to remove. I took particular offense to the practice whereby you get an annoying message box every 2 mins telling you your sub is about to run out, in 2 months time! Thereby forcing you to renew every 10 months just to get of of stupid message blocking what your doing every few mins.

Indeed, I couldn't agree more. You have to download a Norton uninstaller, which still doesn't remove everything properly. And to add insult to injury immediately after installing NAV I couldn't use Live Update because it told me my subscription had expired and I would have to renew !

It took three separate e-mail exchanges with Symantec to get it sorted. Each time they suggested some great rigmarole of a procedure and it was only the final third suggestion which did at last work. It was all down to a corrupt shared Symantec folder. I decided then and there never to buy another Symantec product.

And I've never had much success with the Scot either.

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

Marrea — Thu Oct 18, 2007 8:59 pm

Author: Marrea

Posted: Thu Oct 18, 2007 8:59 pm

So ... I popped the installation DVD in and entered libata=pata_dma=1 as a boot option. This made no difference whatsoever to the absolute age it took to get to the initial installation screen. So I then rebooted and entered brokenmodules=pata_ali as an option. This time it was considerably quicker, loading alim15x3 instead of pata_ali and it didn't hang at loading natsemi.

Great, I thought. Let's add brokenmodules=pata_ali to menu.lst, which I did. Rebooted and instead of Xubuntu's Grub appearing, I saw the SUSE screen. Um, looks like when I entered the option to YaST's Optional Kernel Command Line Parameter, somehow SUSE also moved its bootloader from its root partition to the MBR. (Is it supposed to do that without asking? ) Anyway, no problem I thought, I'll just boot Xubuntu from SUSE's Grub. But no go, all I got was an error. Was it 13, or 21 maybe, can't remember now.

I then spent about an hour trying to get back into Xubuntu and restoring its Grub to the MBR.

That done, I returned to SUSE which still took at least 3 minutes to boot, which surely is completely unacceptable.

Here are some results from hdparm:

Code:

lothian:/home/marrea # hdparm -i /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Model=IC25N020ATCS04-0 , FwRev=CA2OA71A, SerialNo= CSH204DMJ155PF
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=1768kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=?16?
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=39070080
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=yes: mode=0x80 (128) WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-5 T13 1321D revision 3: ATA/ATAPI-2,3,4,5

* signifies the current active mode

lothian:/home/marrea # hdparm -i /dev/sr0
/dev/sr0:
Model=DW-224E-A , FwRev=A.2D , SerialNo=
Config={ Fixed Removeable DTR<=5Mbs DTR>10Mbs nonMagnetic }
RawCHS=0/0/0, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=0
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=0kB, MaxMultSect=0
(maybe): CurCHS=0/0/0, CurSects=0, LBA=yes, LBAsects=0
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: sdma0 sdma1 sdma2 mdma0 *mdma1 mdma2
AdvancedPM=no
Drive conforms to: Unspecified: ATA/ATAPI-2,3,4,5

* signifies the current active mode

lothian:/home/marrea # hdparm -d /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

lothian:/home/marrea # hdparm -d /dev/sr0
/dev/sr0:
HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

I've no idea what all this means.

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

nordle — Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:47 pm

Author: nordle

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:47 pm

yep, nav is horrible, it used to be impossible to remove. I took particular offense to the practice whereby you get an annoying message box every 2 mins telling you your sub is about to run out, in 2 months time! Thereby forcing you to renew every 10 months just to get of of stupid message blocking what your doing every few mins.

A certain Scot sounding alternative is really bad for system resources, possibly worse than nav!

AVG does the job nicely, AVAST is pretty good too, not quite as snappy.

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

wyliecoyoteuk — Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:42 pm

Author: wyliecoyoteuk

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 10:42 pm

[quote="nordle"]If DMA is disabled, this will slow any disk based activity to a complete crawl, boot up included.

I've got an aging laptop which requres nodma switch If I want to use the internal cdrom. By using nodma, the cdrom works, but the HD is slllooooooooooow.

not true, actually (in my experience).
the problem is with the way some faster or older D or dvd drives implement dma, causing file read failures.
after install, dma is restored.

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

Marrea — Wed Oct 17, 2007 9:39 pm

Author: Marrea

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 9:39 pm

Rhakios and nordle

Many thanks for your comments. I will have a play around with this over the next couple of days and see how I get on.

Regarding slow XP boot up, I have XP on two desktops - one with NAV installed and one with AVG Free. The difference in boot up times is quite remarkable. I'm convinced NAV is the culprit. Each new version seems to get more and more bloated and I certainly won't be renewing my subscription when it runs out this time.

Re: OpenSUSE10.3 released

nordle — Wed Oct 17, 2007 9:04 pm

Author: nordle

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 9:04 pm

If DMA is disabled, this will slow any disk based activity to a complete crawl, boot up included.

I've got an aging laptop which requres nodma switch If I want to use the internal cdrom. By using nodma, the cdrom works, but the HD is slllooooooooooow.

hdparm -i /dev/hda (where /dev/hda is the hd you've installed OS on) should tell you what method its using. hdparm can also be used to force DMA, but I'm using Windows at the moment so can't remember the details.

(want to talke about slow boot times, try WinXP, sheeesh, its taken 2 minutes from switch on!)

EDIT:

When I started this post, Rhakios had not responded, his post is more useful.