poor hd result debian sarge+2.6.8

S

scotty do

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 20, 2004
Messages
164
Just updated to kernel 2.6.8 and noticed very very poor performance with hdparm after upgrading. I have searched around and noticed that 2.6.8 turns off DMA. I have turned DMA back on with very little change.

Any ideas why??

This is the first time using debian and compiling my kernel :D not as scary as I thought. I took out all the support for laptops, soundcards, video camera's stuff that I am not running/using because this speeds things up?? Either way, much faster/smaller then fedora!

Results Pre update were about :
Timing buffered disk reads: 52.8 M/B SEC

Now:
Timing buffered disk reads: 4.28 M/B SEC

Asus A7V400
AMD Sempron 2200
256MB DDR ram
Seagate 40gb drive
 
2.6.8 had some hiccups with my amd64 rig. The sata support was somewhat borked on my install. 2.6.9 solved that problem, and 2.6.10 works great as well.

I don't have a solution. But here are some thnigs to check:

are you loading a module for your IDE controller? There may be one specific to your hardware controller.
 
just wondering, is that drive on an sata or pata connection?

if you're using sata, i remember reading something on the gentoo forums that depending on which driver you're using, you'll either get good results, or bad ones.

unfortunately, i'm not smart enough in linux to say which driver was better, i'm just saying i remember reading something about it :)
 
drive is PATA, I will try a different kernel. I thought just forget it and deal with the older kernel, but compiling it really cleans things up...I only use about 50mb of ram after boot...
 
2.6.8 is a pile of poo, quite frankly. Too many bugs to count. 2.6.9 and 2.6.10 are a lot better. Besides, kernel bloat is highly overstated these days - most distros compile a very minimal *kernel* (the actual vmlinuz file in /boot, check the size of this to see how big your true kernel is, you might be surprised) and build everything that isn't absolutely *needed* to go into the kernel itself as a module, loaded only when necessary. So recompiling your kernel really doesn't give you as much of an improvement these days as it did four or five years ago. All those soundcards and video cameras will be built as modules in the default kernel in any case, and won't be loaded unless the hardware is actually present, so they weren't being loaded before either.

I don't know what's causing the problem...another setting to try is 32-bit transfers, hdparm -c 1 (or hdparm -c 3 if 1 causes problems). But anyway, try getting off kernel 2.6.8, in either direction.
 
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