Interesting Lag problems.. suspect: hard drive

DrewMadMax · n00b Joined: 29 Sep 2002 Posts: 43

I'm having an interesting lag problem, if you could call it that. Basically, every once in awhile my mouse pointer jumps to the bottom left of the screen, and both buttons are pressed, all without me having to touch the mouse (I know the buttons are pressed because the taskbar gets minimuzed to the lower right of the screen). I had this problem before when I was using debian. It's cause was my maxtor drive not using DMA (turned out to be a kernel issue, where VIA chipsets weren't able to use DMA). After resolving it, I never noticed this problem again (even after I installed gentoo) until I installed a new WD Caviar SE, and moved my root drive (aka everything) over to it from the maxtor. I set DMA and such, but I still have the problem. Is there something that is trying to burst read/write to the hard drive that could be causing this?? Any suggestions on additional settings to use with hdparm?? (currently I'm using hdparm -c3 -d1 -m16 -u1 /dev/hda). Is there something in the kernel that could resolve this??

Thanksfor the help,

Drew
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pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20583

Have you enabled anything for DMA in the kernel?
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DrewMadMax · n00b Joined: 29 Sep 2002 Posts: 43

Yes, I have DMA enabled, an set on as default for all drives. VIA82CXXX support is also enabled, as I have an Abit KR7A-Raid (the raid is disabled).
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adastra · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 16 Oct 2002 Posts: 106

Unless you are absolutely certain it is the hard drive, you might want to check out some mouse settings. On my laptop, when I have an external mouse connected, the X server kinda freaks out sometimes if I move the mouse quickly (and it exhibits some of the same symptoms you were describing: taskbar minimized, jumps to very edge of screen and won't come back, etc.). I had an option in my BIOS to Enable Multiple Pointing Devices and turning that off worked. Also ended up changing the protocol in the XF86Config from "PS/2" to "IMPS/2" (when I had the external mouse connected).

Also, you may think twice about using the -c3 option in hdparm and simply use -c1. As per the man page, -c3 turns on an extra "sync" option "required by some chipsets" that causes "extra overhead" and probably isn't necessary for your hardware. Just a thought.

You should try booting without passing any hdparm options to the drives and then issue a hdparm -i /dev/harddrive and in the output, the DMA mode (or PIO mode) the drive is currently using will have a * next to it. Usually if your chipset supports DMA and so does your drive, the kernel will use what the drive tells it to.

DrewMadMax · n00b Joined: 29 Sep 2002 Posts: 43

Well, when I don't use hdparm to set the drive upon boot,up, it has EVERYTHING set to 0 (multisect, dma, etc). And that (of course) provided even more performace problems, so I went back to using the hdparm settings I chose (with -c1 this time).

Then, I checked my X config file, and found that the mouse was configured twice: one was set as the device to use, the other had the CorePointer option with it. So, I added the corePointer option to my first mouse, and commented ot the other. I haven't seen any problems since, but it hasn't been that long yet. If the problem reoccurs, I'll prob post again.

Thanks,

Drew
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"True Knowledge Exists in Realizing Your Own Ignorance"