MP983 dma crashes boot

Forum: Laptops
Topic: MP983 dma crashes boot
started by: macplaxton

Posted by macplaxton on Oct. 27 2007,00:06

Hi, first post here. Fairly new to Linux.

I have a MaxData Artist Magic 12.1SE MP983 SL (Chicony MP983 clone) laptop. It has a frugal toram install of DSL 3.4.4. Works fine (but slow) without dma enabled.

I have tried using the dma cheatcode and it shows both the HDD and DVD-ROM as being enabled. Next it hangs for a while at "Looking for CDROM in:" then it proceeds to copy the image to ram. This takes 29s @1.63MB/s. (the same time it takes without DMA cheatcode.) The it eventually crashes with problems accessing the HDD.

The bios is set to DMA / Auto. The hdparm informations shows the hard drive is using UDMA5. Back up of persistent home is equally slow. Laptop has IDE interface: OPTi Inc. 82C825 [Firebridge 2] (rev 30).

Is there any way I can get this working? I feel it should, even if it's not straight-forward! Guidance and suggestions please.

Thanks in advance,
Rich

Posted by curaga on Oct. 27 2007,06:42

Sorry, googling shows that Alan Cox seems to have broken that chipset's dma support in 2.4.20, so maybe a kernel upgrade could help.. Can you try a DSL 4 cd? It has 2.4.31 instead of 2.4.26 of DSL 3.4 series..

Posted by macplaxton on Oct. 27 2007,17:01

Thanks, I came across similar reports about the IDE chipset, hence I mentioned it. It seems odd that something got broken and seemingly never fixed.

I've tried the DSL 4.0 cd and the dma is not working either. I was looking around for a version of Knoppix with the 2.4.19 kernel, but couldn't find one, so I tried DSL 0.4.10 (2.4.20) which doesn't report errors on boot (reports it's turned dma on HDD ok and loads), but I've been unable to test it further for speed.

Is there a way to recompile/patch or otherwise modify kernel 2.4.31 on DSL? I've only tried recompiling a kernel once some time ago, so I'm not the familiar in that area. The idea now is to swap the current kernel for something that works.

Posted by curaga on Oct. 27 2007,18:06

Well, the current 2.4 kernel is 2.4.35.3. If it doesn't have the fix..

I doubt there's a patch for that, I think they would've fixed it in-kernel.
Replacing DSL's kernel with 2.4.35.3 is quite easy though, consisting only of replacing files.
I've only done it on a hard drive install, but a remaster is not too hard either.

Posted by macplaxton on Oct. 27 2007,20:16

Ok, I'll have a play around with DSL 4.0 and after I've configured it, I'll have a play round to try and get the dma working. Will report back later. Cheers.