System freezes for a second or so when hdd in use

[Buchalka]

Hi,

I have gone through a stage 1 installation of gentoo and now have a running system.

I have since installed kde and openoffice (wow talk about long compile times!).

Anyway my problem is that when the computer's hard drives are under use (hdd light on) the system seems to freeze for about a second (no mouse or keyboard available). The keyboard info typed gets buffered and does appear after the freeze is over.

I am suspecting it has something to do with the hard drive drivers I have used (I have an 80GB and a 40GB Seagate IDE drives).

Is it something to do with using 32 bit drivers foe the drives? I am not 100%s ure how to check which drivers I am even using (they were the defaultt ones found by gentoo when installing).

If there is nothing else using the hard drive everything is fine (at the moment I am downloading a linux ISO in the background and the system is pausing all the time foor about a second or so).

Any ideas on how I start to debug this problem?

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks




Tim

[andrewy]

try "hdparm /dev/HardDriveDevice" and see what's enabled.
I had the same problem and using the following options on my hard drives sped them up significantly:
/sbin/hdparm -qd1 -qm 16 -qc 3 -qu 1 /dev/hda

I should point out that there is a possibility of destroying your hard drive's data if you use hdparm options that are incompatible with your drive.

[Buchalka]

[andrewy]

I have no idea how to override the iobus, maybe you could have GRUB/LILO pass the iobus= paramater to the kernel? it might work, I dunno.
As for preserving the settings, I just put this in /etc/conf.d/local.start

/sbin/hdparm -qd1 -qm 16 -qc 3 -qu 1 /dev/hda

(the q just means to not show any output when the setting is applied)

[Rainmaker]

you can add "iobus=66" to your [grub,lilo].conf
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