[ale] boot parms ide=???

Dow Hurst dhurst at kennesaw.edu
Wed Feb 19 10:47:02 EST 2003 



I just wanted my wife to like using Linux so Mozilla needed to start
faster.  Someone on this list had mentioned hdparm as the way to go to
get stuff moving.  Also, my Abit motherboard won't boot any distro off
the HPT372 RAID controller since the driver is not included in any
kernel distribution.  I had to download a closed source driver source
from the HighPoint website, compile it and make it available to the
SuSE 8.0 install routines.  That is about all I know on configuring IDE
stuff.  So I am not the guy to write anything!  Sorry!

Really what I am doing is making educated guesses on any given answer. 
If others on the list agree that my answer is correct, I get a point. 
If they laugh at my answer, I lose a point.  If I get enough points, I
go buy a piece of hardware as a reward.  If I lose too many points, I
have to do extra chores around the house that weekend.<span
 class="moz-smiley-s1"> :-) 

Looking for to the ALE-NW meeting this Thursday!  We could play with
hdparm after the meeting as well as help out a guy who might bring some
hardware that needs configuring.  Do y'all remember the student
Christopher Russell who is from England originally?  He has asked me
about getting his mouse wheel to work and how to get a HPScanJet 6200C
working.  I think I know how to make it happen, but more heads working
on might really make it happen.  I am going to bring name tag stickers
so we can identify ourselves more easily at the meeting.  I have a
really hard time with remembering names and maybe this will help others
out too.
Dow

PS.  I moved my hard drives to the main board controller from the RAID
controller since the software raid functionality wasn't worth it, plus
the installation using the closed driver was a real pain.  I have a XFS
based LVM running off two drives.  My root partition and boot partition
are separate from the LV which is /home.  I really like it and it is
very stable.  I can see just adding drives and extending the partition
if I ever need more disk space.


John Wells wrote:
<blockquote type="cite"
 cite="mid58669.65.213.159.130.1045667597.squirrel at coastal.homelinux.org">
  Sounds like Dow is a prime candidate for writing the How-to "Tuning Drive
I/O with hdparm".

Dow, can you have it finished by this afternoon, so I can play tonight? :-)

John

Dow Hurst said:
  
  
    Geof,
If you set the kernel ide parameter to 66 then I wonder if you limit
throughput to 66 max.  You could check this with hdparm by booting with
different ide parm values and just testing transfer rates.  I know that
tuning my wife's SuSE 7.3 install with hdparm I went from 6Mb to ~25Mb
per sec just by setting dma.  On my SuSE 8.1 machine I found dma already
 set and a transfer rate of ~40Mb per sec was pretty consistent.  This
is  limited by the bus so you could back calculate where the limiting
factor  would be.  A video card data transfer would be another way to
test  throughput for a PCI based card.  Does AGP go thru the bus or
bypass it  on another faster route?  I don't know enough about how this
stuff works  now.  I used to have the old 86, 286, and 386 stuff down
pretty good as  to how it works. ;-)

One thought is if you have a faster IDE controller are you loading the
right kernel driver to take advantage of the speed available?  Is there
a driver specific for your controller?  I know the RAID cards have
faster controllers and specific drivers since I dealt with the HPT372
driver on the motherboard I'm using now.  My 40Mb specs are not from the
 133 RAID HPT372 controller but the 100 main board controller.

Dow


Geoffrey wrote:

    
    
      I've been trying to research the various boot parameters available.
Particularily regarding ide parms.  I find references to a doc
README.ide in the kernel source, but I've got two sets of source,
neither has the file.  I finally tracked one down, but no reference to
 the ide parms I'm looking for.

In particular, I had a box that had an ata66 controller and passing
ide=66 was recognized.

Following that process I have another box with an ata100 controller,
but when attempting ide=100, I receive an error that this is invalid.
 Valid values are 20-66.

I've seen references to ide=100 in searches, so I assumed this was
valid.

These are 2.4.19 kernels, pretty current.

Anyone care to shed some light on this??

      
    
    --
__________________________________________________________
Dow Hurst                  Office: 770-499-3428
Systems Support Specialist    Fax: 770-423-6744
1000 Chastain Rd., Bldg. 12
Chemistry Department SC428  Email:dhurst at kennesaw.edu
Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com
Kennesaw, GA 30144
*********************************
*Computational Chemistry is fun!*
*********************************


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-- 
__________________________________________________________
Dow Hurst                  Office: 770-499-3428
Systems Support Specialist    Fax: 770-423-6744
1000 Chastain Rd., Bldg. 12
Chemistry Department SC428  Email:dhurst at kennesaw.edu
Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com
Kennesaw, GA 30144
*********************************
*Computational Chemistry is fun!*
*********************************

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