Hi, I've emerged athcool some time ago, and was using it for weeks without any issues. However, I just found out it causes problems with external firewire devices - depending on the type of device, you'll get data loss or bad performance. This is 100% reproducible on my hardware: - Athlon XP 2000+ (Palomino) - VIA KT333 (Chaintech Apogee 7VJL board) - Creative Labs SB Audigy FireWire Port - Oxford 911 based firewire bridge - vanilla 2.6.15.3 kernel Oxford 911 bridges with 3xx firmware give bad performance while athcool is running; using 4xx firmware anything you write to a device (tested with harddisk, DVD writer) will be completely garbled. Unfortunately I was using the 4xx firmware originally, so I lost like 80GB of data before finding out the cause. The kernel only shows this concerning the problem: sde: Current: sense key=0x0 ASC=0x0 ASCQ=0x0 This message will repeat once for each write access, so it repeats a lot when accessing hard disks. On a sidenote, the warning shown when emerging athcool may be a bit short. With the currently stable (can dangerous software as this be stable?) ebuild v0.3.9, it just says: * WARNING: This program can cause instability in your system. * Use at your own risk! It should say the following (taken from the athcool program itself): * WARNING: Depending on your motherboard and/or hardware components, * enabling Athlon powersaving mode may cause: * - noisy or distorted sound playback * - a slowdown in harddisk performance * - system locks or instability * - massive filesystem corruption * USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
added warning from upstream author's site
