Hi Jim,
On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, Jim Haliburton wrote:
> Pls elaborate on irqtune and hdparm? I know about the spd_hi
> and spd_vhi. The others are new to me. A link or reference and
> I can look it up myself.
hdparm just adjusts some kernel parameters for dealing with the
IDE hard drive subsystem. irqtune adjusts the priority of the
interrupts in the system. hdparm is available at
<ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/hardware/>. I don't know
about irqtune, I haven't used it myself, but others seem to have
good things to say about it. Likely it's available in the same
place.
The hd parameter that affects serial performance is whether the
IDE system masks other interrupts while the disk is being
accessed. For safety, interrupts are masked by default. You can
get the kernel to unmask interrupts with the command
hdparm -u 1 /dev/hdx
where x is the drive letter. Be sure to read the section on
MASSIVE FILESYSTEM CORRUPTION in the hdparm manual and perform a
complete backup of your system before you experiment with it.
You might also want to check out the -m parameter.
It may not be a major issue on newer systems with fast hard drives
and big serial buffers, but on my junky old 486 I found that my
download speed doubled when I unmasked interrupts on my main IDE
hard drive. You can see whether hd interrupts are slowing down
your system by watching download performance with ncftp or a
similar program that updates the number of bytes transferred with
every packet received; listen to your hard drive or watch the
drive light as you watch the number of bytes tick off. You may
find that each time the system accesses the hard drive by flushing
its disk buffers, the download stalls.
Ed
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-diald" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
