Bug 64525 - Lack of dma on cdrom drives causes extremely poor interactive performance
Summary: Lack of dma on cdrom drives causes extremely poor interactive performance
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Linux
Classification: Retired
Component: initscripts
Version: 7.3
Hardware: i386
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Bill Nottingham
QA Contact: Brock Organ
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2002-05-07 05:35 UTC by Nathan G. Grennan
Modified: 2014-03-17 02:27 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2002-05-07 05:35:24 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Nathan G. Grennan 2002-05-07 05:35:20 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0+) Gecko/20020501

Description of problem:
I fresh installed Redhat 7.3 today. I found while burning extra copies of Redhat
7.3 that with the new default of disabling dma on my cdrom drives caused
extremely poor interactive performance. I have seen it seem to freeze and then
job from 82% to 100% burning, and the mouse wouldn't move. By using hdparm -d1
/dev/hdc  to reenable dma I was able to fix the problem. The comments in
rc.sysinit suggest that dma on is problematic for some, but it is also
problematic for others off. I also have read another bug report about skipjack
beta that someone couldn't use their cd burner drive at all with dma disabled. I
think the lines to disable dma on cdrom drives should be removed or at least
commented out in a future release.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. login as a user
2. run xcdroast
3. select iso to burn
4. start burning iso

	

Actual Results:  The screen redraws slowly or freezes for seconds at a time.

Expected Results:  Interactively of X to be normal

Additional info:

I am noticed this while burning at 24X. I suspect that 4x wouldn't be that
noticable, but 24X definitely is for me. I have a ABIT KT7A-RAID and the CDRW
drive is on the secondary VIA IDE controller. I am using the default, out of the
box/compiled by redhat, kernel for Redhat 7.3.

Comment 1 Bill Nottingham 2002-05-07 15:47:54 UTC
This was done intentionally, as many CD-ROM drives do not have proper DMA support.
You can create /etc/sysconfig/harddisk<device> that has:

USE_DMA=1

to reenable it on boot.


Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.