On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 04:53:19PM +0000, Fabian Haischmann <fcch@gmx.de> wrote:

Hi Lars,

You have a via 82686 chip, which is buggy, if DMA is enabled.

what does this mean exactly? necessary data corruption?

I think in the Bios DMA is enabled for hda (dmesg output). When did you make the hdparam output? There is DMA off, but (I think) in the hdparam -i it's on (UDMA2).

well, I wondered about it myself. the hdparm and hdparm -i where about the same second, few minutes after reboot... and I found no message about disabling DMA in the syslogs. suse 7.2 by default enables DMA support, if it thinks it worked (?). I did not fiddle with the settings myself. Not on this box, at least ;) so seemingly the kernel and the drive do not agree about the (en/dis)abled status of DMA? how comes? if hdparm shows me DMA is of, I probably can not disable it further... how can I disable this, then; and am I out of trouble if I could? will disabling DMA in the BIOS help? I thought the linux drivers do not care about bios settings. where can I find a list of known buggy, or even better a positiv list of recommended hardware?