I recently switched/upgraded from Caldera OpenLinux 2.3 (kernel 2.2.10) to Suse Professional 7.2. While there's much I like in the new setup, hard drive performance isn't on the list! Indeed, with the default Suse pre-compiled 2.4.4 kernel, hard drive performance seems abysmal. (I have a Maxtor IDE 91741U4 drive - a 17 gig UDMA66 drive.) Subjectively, the system seems to perform as if drive caching were disabled, with lots of delays for drive reads to complete, the drive light on frequently, and grinding noises coming from the drive. Since I still have OpenLinux 2.3 installed and bootable on the same drive, its easy for me to switch back and forth between Suse and Caldera, just to confirm that the drive performs much better under Caldera. (The 2.4.4 kernel is already set to use dma, and hdparm does nothing to improve performance.) I tried switching from the 2.4.4 kernel to the pre-compiled 2.2.19 kernel which comes with Suse 7.2, and indeed under 2.2.19, drive performance "feels" much better. I also tried compiling my own 2.2.19 and 2.2.18 kernels, to see if that would further improve the drive performance. Here are the results - using "hdparm -t": Results for "hdparm -t" (rate for buffered disk reads of 64 MB): Suse compiled 2.2.19 kernel ~ 9.5 MB/sec self-compiled 2.2.19 kernel ~11.5 MB/sec self-compiled 2.2.18 kernel ~11.5 MB/sec Caldera complied 2.2.10 kernel ~15.5 MB/sec For the record, this is an AMD K6-2 system running at 450mhz on a TYAN Trinity 100AT (S1590S) motherboard. The chipset is a VIA MVP3. "free" reports 322 MB main memory installed. I'm confused on a number of counts: - Why does the 2.4.4 performance feel so poor? Is this the infamous 2.4 kernel series virtual memory (vm) problem? A search on deja.com turned up several references to via chipset problems under 2.4 - maybe that's what is responsible? - Why would the Suse pre-compiled 2.2.19 kernel perform so much worse than a self-compiled kernel? (I couldn't find the 2.2.19 sources on the suse web site, so I downloaded the sources from kernel.org) - Finally, what do I need to do to get the ide performance under 2.2.19 back to what it was under 2.2.10? Thanks, Dan Greenberg Ann Arbor, MI USA