DMA Problems

rhollencamp · n00b Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 3

I'm having problems getting DMA activated on my cdrom drive in my laptop (Acer Aspire 5672WLMi). Ripping performance is terrible, and DVD's are too laggy to watch. I've messed around with it for the last couple of days and can't figure it out. Any help would be appriciated.

didymos · Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 9:00 am Post subject:

The only thing that comes immediately to mind is that somehow DMA got disabled for that drive in the bios. Obviously, there's no way the drive is DMA incapable.
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Thomas S. Howard

bollucks · l33t Joined: 27 Oct 2004 Posts: 606

Certain combinations of "enhanced mode" for SATA and PATA in the bios can make this happen. Try enabling it for sata only or something like that.

JeliJami · Veteran Joined: 17 Jan 2006 Posts: 1086 Location: Belgium

didymos · Posted: Mon May 08, 2006 8:05 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I should have remembered that. When I added an SATA drive to my system and switched to enhanced mode on both, the kernel flipped out when it tried to initialize the CD-ROM. Now with newer kernels, it just complains for 20 lines or so, then finally loads. I'd bet if I tested it out, I'd find that DMA wouldn't work on my drive either.
_________________
Thomas S. Howard

rhollencamp · n00b Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 3

the bios on the system is a joke, there are almost no options

basically the only thing you can do is set the boot order. The drive works fine in windows though, so it must not be a hardware problem. I tried the livecd but I couldn't get dma to work there either. Is there anything else to try or am I SOL? Should I open a bug report and who would I do that with?

bollucks · l33t Joined: 27 Oct 2004 Posts: 606

At least try disabling the generic IDE driver since you shouldn't need it. Sometimes it conflicts and fights with the correct driver for ownership of an IDE channel

Change to:
# CONFIG_IDE_GENERIC is not set

by unsetting:
< > generic/default IDE chipset support

in menuconfig

rhollencamp · n00b Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 3

when I remove support for the generic ide controller /dev/hdc is no longer there, so support for the drive must have been comming through the generic driver

as a side note, if I do hdparm -c1 /dev/hdc DVD's become watchable at least. are there any more flags I could try?

bollucks · l33t Joined: 27 Oct 2004 Posts: 606

These settings only help if dma is disabled as in your case:
hdparm -c 1 -u 1 -m 16 /dev/hdc

multicount (-m) may not do anything on a cdrom but it's not dangerous trying to set it

You really need to get the IDE driver working though. That's clearly your main problem.

troymc · Guru Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 553

I believe for your IDE chipset:

jparal · n00b Joined: 21 Sep 2003 Posts: 20

Hi everybody,

I have the same problem on my Acer 8204. Does anybody have the solution?

el3ktro · Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2006 8:43 pm Post subject:

I have the very same problem with my 945gm-based notebook. When I disable the generic driver, my CD/DVD drive disappears, so it seems that the Intel driver in the kernel doesn't do anything, in fact when I disable it my CD/DVD drive is still there.

Did somebody found a solution yet?

Tom

Cybersorcerer · Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 1:48 pm Post subject:

Hi el3ktro,

you might have done most of this already but i am outlining the complete procedure here (i got it working that way):
You absolutely need to reconfigure your IDE Bus to use the SATA Driver

1) Remove support for for the IDE bus. Deselect the following option

el3ktro · Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 3:41 pm Post subject:

Thanks so far for your help. Well it works partly. I'm running 2.6.17-suspend2-r4 and the latest software from ~x86. I've did everything you said, disabled IDE, enabled SATA (which I needed anyway for my SATA harddisk and added the boot option to grub. Well when I rebooted I see this in dmesg:

Cybersorcerer · Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 4:42 pm Post subject:

Here are the parts from my kernel config. I did not enable AHCI support.

Cybersorcerer · Posted: Sun Sep 03, 2006 7:54 pm Post subject:

Hi el3ktro,

out of curiosity .... does it work now ?
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greetings

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Too old to die young

Dell Precision M90, Intel Centrino Duo T2700 @ 2.33GHz running Jackass! 2006.2

el3ktro · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 11:54 am Post subject:

Hi, sorry I didn't make it to write earler - thanks for asking. I'm afraid it does not work :-(

I configured everything like you said, and I got a device called sr0 and I was able to mount it, but I wasn't able to access the CD. I did see the directory contents, but when I tried to copy something - even as root - I got strange permission and IO errors. There's a new kernel release today, perhaps I can try again with this one. Thanks for your help though!

Tom

Cybersorcerer · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 12:39 pm Post subject:

Hi,

strange ... does DVD playback work ? And another stupid question, do you have support for the iso9660 FS in your kernel ?

Cybersorcerer · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 6:08 pm Post subject:

Hi,

something else to check ..... You should have the following links in /dev ....

el3ktro · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 6:48 pm Post subject:

Hi, thanks again for your help. I've switched to the newest suspend2-sources, and I'll recompile it again with your serup and test if it works then. I'll post the results later this evening!

Tom

el3ktro · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 8:30 pm Post subject:

OK I'm getting closer. I re-configured my kernel again, and now I can read from my CD perfectly, I have /dev/sr0 and all the correct symlinks that you mentioned. I can manually mount the CD and access it - but Gnome for some reason doesn't recognize the drive anymore and CDs/DVDs don't get automounted. Do you know how to solve that?

Thanks for your help so far!

Tom

Cybersorcerer · Posted: Tue Sep 05, 2006 7:10 am Post subject:

Hi Tom,

sorry but i have no idea how gnome works, i have always used KDE. I am afraid you are on your own with this one. However
maybe the following links will help you to sort out your problem :

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_gnome-volume-manager
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Auto_mount_filesystems_%28AUTOFS%29
_________________
greetings

Cybersorcerer
--
Too old to die young

Dell Precision M90, Intel Centrino Duo T2700 @ 2.33GHz running Jackass! 2006.2

aminalshmu · Posted: Sun Sep 17, 2006 12:04 am Post subject: help!

HELP!

I have been struggling to get DMA working on my optical drives ever since I started using linux on my system with SATA hard drives which seems like at least two years. Yes. Two years. Ugh.

I've spent all of today looking at similar posts and trying solutions - I've tried every combination of settings for SATA in the BIOS, as many reasonable combinations of kernel configurations that I can think would make some sort of difference, switching between ATA and SCSI, and appending various lines to grub.conf in the hopes that some sort of voodoo magic will happen.

Basically, when I can get my DVD-RW to work (this is the second one I've bought; I figured maybe it was just hardware incompatibility... I struggled with my old DVD-ROM/CD-RW too), it doesn't work very well, and I have yet to see DMA enabled for any one of the many optical drives I've had in this system.

Please, someone more knowledgeable than me about these issues, shed some light on this for me!

aminalshmu · Posted: Sun Sep 17, 2006 5:11 pm Post subject:

Cybersorcerer · Posted: Sun Sep 17, 2006 5:45 pm Post subject:

Hi,

this is definitely a problem :