(dell8200) laptop with disk(hda) and cd(hdb) too busy?

[Peter Teuben]

On Thu, 30 Dec 2004, Peter Teuben wrote:

> 
> My dell8200 laptop has often given me problems with disk I/O
> speed in both KDE and Gnome when their cd-cgecking deamon was
> active. Thus a command like
> 	hdparm -t /dev/hda
> would give me terribly erratic results (1-7 MB/sec) if there was
> no CD in the tray. Once mounted, things were better, or normal.
> I'd get more like 17-22 MB/s, depending on the disk of course.
> 
> At least in rh7 and rh9 i knew how to solve it (they were filed in bugzilla).
> I'm sadly returning to this problem with FC3. This time the problem is even
> present outside of X. I returned to runlevel 3, but even there i can terrible
> I/O. One side-effect of bad disk I/O is that the "startx" command will take
> forever to load, and don't even try something like openoffice :-)
>  
> So, first of all, i'm looking for soulmates who can confirm that
> a dell8200, or any other laptop with hda and hdb populated have the
> same problem, and then see how this can be solved. As it stands now,
> i cannot use FC3.  I don't know if the problem should occur with two
> drives on hda and hdb, since once the CD is either inserted or mounted,
> the problem appears to go away.
> 
> I should also add i've been running FC3 just fine on a desktop, with 
> IDE (a+c) software raid and a SATA disk.

I'll answer my own question here: i disabled the HAL daeamon, and that pretty
much did the job:
	/etc/init.d/haldaemon stop
there is still some residual performance jitten due to the automounting CD
in gnome, but it's not as bad as stopping hald. The automounting problem is
actualy close to the prblems that FC1 used to have with magicdev (and KDE
with autorun). I should also add that not all dell8200 can reproduce my problem,
so perhaps it's also hardware related.

peter