Tom Fawcett wrote:
> I recently installed Mandrake 6.0. Shortly thereafter I started noticing
> hard disk problems that I couldn't explain, including filesystem corruption
> and I/O errors. I've had no problems with my disks before this. I
> eventually tracked down the problem to this code in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit:
>
> # Optimisation of Hard drive.
> if [ -x /sbin/hdparm ];then
> LIST_HD=$(grep '^hd.*' /var/log/dmesg|\
> grep -ivE '(CD.*ROM|FLOPPY|TAPE|STATUS)'|cut -d: -f1|sort|uniq)
> for i in $LIST_HD;do
> action "Starting Hard Drive optimisations for $i" \
> hdparm -q -c1 -q -A1 -q -m16 -q -d1 /dev/$i
> done
> fi
> Given this warning, these settings seems like strange and bad defaults. At
> least I should be able to turn off these optimizations without having to
> move the hdparm executable, and I'd argue that rc.sysinit shouldn't be
> trying to optimize my hard disk at all since it doesn't know what it's
> dealing with. If I were a Linux newbie I'd probably never have figured out
> what was going on.
>
> Comments?
I can confirm that these settings are probably not well chosen, and
_did_
perform incorrectly on my machine (AMD K6/300, VIA MVP3, IBM UDMA/33
HD).
Although I did not catch any file corruption, the settings from the
above
consistently gave me around 6M/s in hdparm -t -T, whereas the HD and the
chipset, when properly configured, give me around 10M/s (UDMA/33).
Also, the script above tried also to run the same optimization string
on /dev/hdc, which on my system is a cdrom !!! (well, not quite,
actually
it's a dvd-rom, but seen by Linux as a cdrom drive).
When the script was running, I got errors (0x50 on the HD and 0x58 on
the DVD drive) followed by a reset of the IDE interface, after which
all appeared to run, but without DMA on either the HD or the DVD (both
support DMA, and of course the MVP3 chipset does too).
I only had to comment out the script to get back UDMA/33 for the HD and
DMA support for the DVD, with corresponding performance improvement.
--
Jean-Louis Debert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
74 Annemasse France
old Linux fan
