From Bugzilla Helper: 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:
http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/testkernels/ has a newer kernel where the Intel ICH5 PCI ID's are added
The 2.4.20-9.5 test kernel enabled DMA by default, and also enabled AGP (I forgot to mention or file a bug, but AGP wasn't working either in the standard 2.4.20-9 kernel). Thanks!
this is now released as erratum; closing as such.