Moving my thread over to the proper list... first...
Now then - thanks to everyone on the list for your help. I've had barely
any sleep lately, so I must apologize first, for putting the original
thread onto the security mailing list by mistake.
For anyone who's wondering - I have an AMD64 box, with a new Gentoo
AMD64 install. The hard drive read times are obnoxiously slow - so, I'm
going to attribute this to the wrong driver being loaded for the controller.
See here:
hdparm -tT /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads: 3016 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1507.91 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:4 MB in 3.68 seconds = 1.09 MB/sec
Horribly slow! This machine should be blazing fast, with the 7200 rpm
200 GB hard drive, AMD64 3500+ processor, 1.5 MB RAM, and very modern
motherboard to compliment.
So, in the meantime, I'm trying to track down the culprit that's making
my drive run so slow.
Here's my lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 Host Bridge (rev 10)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc RS480 PCI-X Root Port
00:12.0 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc ATI 4379 Serial ATA Controller
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB Host Controller
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 USB2 Host Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 SMBus Controller (rev 11)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Standard Dual Channel PCI
IDE Controller ATI
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-ISA Bridge
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc IXP SB400 PCI-PCI Bridge
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron]
HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron]
Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron]
DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron]
Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV41.0 (rev a2)
02:05.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. IEEE 1394 Host
Controller (rev 80)
02:09.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado]
(rev 78)
02:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB0400 Audigy2 Value
And modules:
Module Size Used by
nvidia 4057916 12
snd_pcm_oss56224 0
snd_mixer_oss 19392 1 snd_pcm_oss
eth139422608 0
snd_emu10k1 122180 1
snd_rawmidi30112 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_seq_device 10576 2 snd_emu10k1,snd_rawmidi
snd_ac97_codec108120 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_pcm 100936 3 snd_pcm_oss,snd_emu10k1,snd_ac97_codec
snd_timer 27336 2 snd_emu10k1,snd_pcm
snd_ac97_bus3392 1 snd_ac97_codec
snd_page_alloc 12560 2 snd_emu10k1,snd_pcm
snd_util_mem6016 1 snd_emu10k1
snd_hwdep 11936 1 snd_emu10k1
3c59x 50420 0
mii 7040 1 3c59x
ata_piix 12548 0
sata_vsc9988 0
sata_sis9796 0
sata_sx4 15812 0
sata_nv11652 0
sata_via 10436 0
sata_svw9540 0
sata_sil 11588 0
sata_promise 14148 0
libata 65296 9
ata_piix,sata_vsc,sata_sis,sata_sx4,sata_nv,sata_via,sata_svw,sata_sil,sata_promise
sbp2 27076 0
ohci1394 35532 0
ieee1394 109752 3 eth1394,sbp2,ohci1394
ohci_hcd 22340 0
uhci_hcd 34848 0
usb_storage71360 0
usbhid 41056 0
ehci_hcd 35336 0
I'll be spending the rest of the day trying to figure out what's going
on here. Of course, if anyone has some insight, that would ultimately be
most helpful! Off to work I go...
Thanks all on the list(s).
Robert Larson wrote:
Hello Jeff,
I've had 3 machines exhibit this kind of behaviour in the last few months.
On the first machine, it was an intermitten IDE controller failure (probably
related to heat and expansion of motherboard compoenents). I was able to
bypass it by installing a PCI SATA controller. The way that I was able to
figure this out was by running knoppix on it (I tried windows too, just in
case). When running knoppix (and, that OTHER os), the problems still
occured.
The second and third machines were having problems because the wrong drivers
were loaded for the motherboard IDE controller. On the first of these
machines, I ran knoppix and it correctly loaded the drivers (I used lsmod to
find them ;-). On the second of these machines, it was a production machine,
and it took a lot of time because I couldn't just bring it down. I was
getting operation not permitted when trying to enable DMA. Eventually, I
had performed lspci, and saw the controller,
