repost/wishlist item: FC2 libata/system response with busy disk

[Marc Lucke]

My CPU is not overworked so renicing doesn't help.  I'm sure it is a 
libata thing.  Under my self compiled kernels > 2.4.24 my sata disk came 
up as hde and I could tune it using hdparm (not that that really made a 
difference over auto-configured values anyway) but as hde my system did 
not have quite such serious slowdowns.  It seems to me that there are 2 
development tracks for sata - ata & scsi emulation (the latter libata).  
The latter doesn't work very well on my system.  Hey, but the FC2 test 
kernel 2.6.6 actually booted my system unaided for the first time for 
any FC kernel.  Perfomance still hasn't improved, though, but I'm just 
happy it is now working at all.  Unlike some on this list that I get way 
too annoyed with, I'm running on the leading edge of not only Redhat's 
efforts, but in many ways Linux itself so I'm happy to put up with some 
of these things and wait until a bright spark can fix the problem.  The 
only thing I can give back is to report my problems.

I'm not entirely sure, but hdparm for ATA devices gives an option to 
unmask the irq.  To my knowledge this allows the system to handle things 
even if the hard disk is ultra busy.  Perhaps it may have something to 
do with acpi - i.e. the way the kernel handles hardware interrupts?

Chadley Wilson wrote:

>On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 09:02, Marc Lucke wrote:
>  
>
>>I have posted this before and gotten precisely nowhere.  So I thought I 
>>would put it back up and also put it out there that a fix in the next 
>>kernel update would make me very happy.
>>
>>The problem:  when my disk is very busy - like when using dvdauthor - my 
>>computer stops responding to everything else.
>>Relevant Hardware:  Gigabyte 8IPE1000Pro2 m/b + SATA disk (ICH5, 865PE)
>>History:
>>(0) had FC1 running with self-compiled > 2.4.24 kernels and the system 
>>saw my SATA disk as hde
>>(1) system booted from FC2 CD just as it did for the FC1 by loading 
>>ata_piix (& necessary dependencies)
>>(2) system would not boot from installed kernel
>>(3) thanks to the Fedora IRC channel I found out how to modify the 
>>initrd to get my system to load ata_piix
>>(4) system now uses libata and sees my SATA disk as sda
>>(5) with my hdd recognised as hde (see note 0) has hde my system would 
>>respond to smtp & web requests a bit more slowly, but it still worked.  
>>As sda it will actually timeout connections to port 25 under load
>>(6) posted all sorts of requests to this list but I think step 3 is 
>>beyond most on this list, let alone this problem
>>
>>I'm not complaining.  Just if someone exists that knows above can 
>>respond or else it can it be added to some developer's wishlist?  I'd 
>>love to get FC2 working like I had FC1 working with kernels greater than 
>>2.4.24
>>
>>
>>Marc
>>    
>>
>I had same problem with mencoder.
>
>Why don't you renice dvdauthor to a lower priority so that your mouse
>and other bits of the OS can still function?
>It worked beautifully. :-)
>I used 
>renice 5 -p 3203 (3203 being the PID for mecoder at the time)
>  
>
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