Some hard drives do not automatically start with DMA on. hdparm allows the user to have DMA turned on at boot. Unfortunately, checkroot has a depend of "*" this causes it to fsck the root file system before hdparm runs. hdparm should run before checkroot or some of hdparms functionality should be incorporated into checkroot. -- Some might argue that it is safer to run with DMA off especially when doing and fsck. However, (1) the drive may perform reliably with DMA, (2) operation with out DMA can be 10x slower, and (3) Gentoo is a bout giving user choices. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. rc-update add hdparm boot 2. reboot Actual Results: hdparm runs after checkroot. Expected Results: hdparm run before checkroot.
Do: # echo "hdparm checkroot hostname modules checkfs localmount" > /etc/runlevels/boot/.critical