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User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225

Description of problem:
I just laid hands on an IBM ThinkPad T40.  With Red Hat 9 on it, the hard drive
access is incredibly slow.  Further, the mouse and keyboard tend to lock up
under heavy disk usage, or more precisely, the events are not delivered for
10-30 seconds while the hard drive light is on, and then they catch up when the
hard drive light goes off.  I know little about such matters, but there is some
more detail at the URL below, which suggests enabling DMA access improves the
situation measurably:

http://www.w-m-p.com/linux-on-t40.html#setting%20up%20hardware%20support

When I try to enable DMA, it doesn't work:
[root@falcon root]# hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
 using_dma    =  0 (off)

The page referenced above states that DMA works with a more recent kernel, so it
seems like there's a patch out there that fixes this, and it would be great if
it was included in a future Red Hat 9 kernel update.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
kernel-2.4.20-9

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. SFTP or rsync or something to fetch a large set of files


Actual Results:  Wave cursor around in X-Windows, try to type in a terminal,
watch cursor stagger and then leap and wait for keystrokes to appear

Expected Results:  Smooth UI response during disk access

Additional info: