A solution has been found ! Thanks to Bas van der Vlies and Gerben Roest. The conclusions are:
1. The SI 2.4.25 kernel has all IDE drivers as modules (check the SI source file systemimager/patches/linux.i386.config), so in order to get speedy I/O during installation you need to load manually the appropriate IDE driver in the SI master script (in /var/lib/systemimager/scripts/XXX_image.master). The IBM PCs we used in this case have the Intel i865 chipset with the Intel IDE chip. Find out your own chipset first !
2. By default DMA seems to be turned off, so you have to enable DMA manually (provided you have modern hardware). Although the "hdparm" tool can do this, "hdparm" isn't available in the standard SI, but there's another possibility: Use the file /proc/ide/ide0/hda/settings to read or write settings for the /dev/hda disk.
3. I modified my SI master script by adding just before the line
### BEGIN partition /dev/hda ###
the following lines:
echo "Loading ide chipset modules.."
# Intel PIIX IDE driver
modprobe piix
# Setting harddisk speed to maximum!
echo "io_32bit:1" > /proc/ide/ide0/hda/settings
echo "using_dma:1" > /proc/ide/ide0/hda/settings
echo "Updated harddisk parameters are"
cat /proc/ide/ide0/hda/settings
# sleep 10 # For checking the output visuallyThe transfer of a 2.0 GB disk image with a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet went down from about 15 minutes to about 4 minutes. The filesystem creation time was also much reduced.
Ole Holm Nielsen Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark
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