Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 20174
a bug that may slows down the performance of Linux
Last modified: 2005-10-31 17:00:50 EST
I am using Redhat 7.0 on my pentium II computer with 256M ram. Also, I have two SCSI harddisks and 1 IDE CD-Rom Drive. After upgrading from Redhat 6.2 to 7.0 , a message always displays on the screen "hda: ATAPI 40X CD-ROM Drive, 128kb Cache". The screen is full of this text. After I press any key then the cursor comes back. I also sometimes need to re-boot the computer to restart the installed sendmail service on that computer because the computer performance is slow down. Many staff in my company complain about the dis-continue of email service. Where is the source of the bug? How can I fix it? Best regards, Timmy
The IDE CD-ROM message is very likely coming from magicdev. You may want to consider disabling it. You should also make sure you're running the latest updates.
I think the performance problems (whatever they are) they are unrelated to the messages. The kernel messages are harmless and are generated every 10 minutes when /etc/cron.d/kmod removes the module, and then magicdev reloads it next time it checks for the presence of a CDROM device. (This check occurs every two seconds.) It's strange a little that you are getting the kernel messages directed to your screen - by default, all kernel messages are logged to syslogd and should show up in /var/log/messages. At a rate of once every 10 minutes, and considering that syslog removes duplicate messages, I would not consider this a major problem. If you do ps auxw | grep klogd, what does that show? It's possible that klogd is not running on your system for some reason, which would disable the redirection of error messages. Did turning off magicdev fix the performance problems? Thanks, Owen
No reply after more than a month... closing.