Desktop: Power Off and HD glitches

[timbod]

I've just installed gentoo for the first time, and so far so good. I have two outstanding hardware glitches, both of which I guess can probably be fixed with kernel settings, but hopefully some advice can avoid some tedious experimentation.

Responsiveness of the system is good, except when the hard disk is being intensively accessed (eg when unpacking a big tar file). Then the mouse freeze sometimes for a second or two.

When I shut down the machine, It stops at a message (something like "power down") but then sits there without actually doing it.

This is on a fairly unexciting desktop machine (Duron 850, 512MB ram, MSI motherboard, VIA chipset, IBM 7200rpm 30GB drive). Not feeling particularly adventurous, I chose the vanilla 2.4.20 kernel.

I previously was running redhat 7.3, and didn't get either of these problems.

Advice much appreciated!

[timbod]

Just found this reference

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=51

which seems to solve the hard disk problem. I've show the dramatic effects on the timing below.

Still curious about the power off issue though...

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bash-2.05b# hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.79 seconds =162.03 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 35.02 seconds = 1.83 MB/sec
bash-2.05b# hdparm -c 1 -d 1 /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
setting 32-bit IO_support flag to 1
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
using_dma = 1 (on)
bash-2.05b# hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.73 seconds =175.34 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.77 seconds = 36.16 MB/sec
bash-2.05b#

[fifo]

You want apm support in the kernel to get the machine to power itself down. I have