Forgive the question of ignorance:
Does (SUSE) Linux have this Direct Memory Access (DMA) thing or not?
Windows seems to have it, and while I am not saying that Linux should have everything Windows does, I find that accessing optical discs from Linux is somewhat slower than from Windows. The question has been answered in the previous posts, but I would like to add a somewhat political comment here. DMA is a feature of the hardware drivers and has been a feature in Linux
On Tuesday 04 April 2006 11:02 pm, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
probably since 1991. Historically, in the past there was a hardware problem
with some IDE controllers so Linux was shipped with DMA turned off (back in
2.2 kernel time frame I believe). More recent releases (SuSE 9+) have
shipped with DMA generally turned on for HD, but as mentioned otherwise,
turned off for optical devices) it is easily configurable through YaST.
Additionally, Linux disk I/O has also been shown to be faster than Windows
I/O, even when reading from or writing to Windows native file systems. Both
Linux and Unix have a number of kernel buffers that are used by Linux and
the drivers to buffer all the I/O.
--
Jerry Feldman