Hi Gentoo Kernel folks ;-) I was wondering if you could push this patch upward in the kernel tree. It's for DMA on the ICH6_5 chipset from intel, which is found on some laptops. I'm using a Eurocom M560A. I have been manually applying this patch since about March 2006 from kernels upward of 2.6.16. The problem was that I got this (garbage) laptop from work, immediately loaded gentoo on it, and noticed that everything from disk reads, to running X, or reading a CDROM was dreadfully slow - DMA of course ;-) Then I did some research on the mainboard to see if there was something missing, tried running Ubuntu, and noticed that it lacked the slowness described above. I found this URL with a fairly anonymous patch and I guess up until now it hasn't sneaked into the kernel. http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ide&m=114317385718285&w=2 This patch is extremely basic, and only adds a couple of new definitions which are supported by the existing kernel code. very harmless, but it increased my disk throughput by something like 3000% :) Regards, ~/Chris Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.you will need a laptop with ICH6_5 / 82801FB (Mobile chipset) from intel. 2. use any gentoo kernel as is 3. hdparm -tT <your root device> Actual Results: something like 3MB/sec Expected Results: 32MB/sec Check out the original patch at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ide&m=114317385718285&w=2 It has a bit more context which could be helpful.
I think this is deliberately excluded because it supports the newer AHCI modes so you do not need to run it in blk_dev_piix legacy mode. Try the ATA_PIIX driver. Note that your disk will move from hda to sda.
see comment #1
I just tested it out - what was wierd was that with the old ATA_PIIX driver, the disks would still show up as /dev/hdc ... After changing to the newer driver, they are now /dev/sda ... It's working very well now Thanks for the help ;-)
