Messages in this thread | | | From | Zdenek Kabelac <> | Subject | Re: over 5Gb missing from a 13.5Gb disk | Date | Tue, 7 Dec 1999 19:04:45 GMT |
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DAVID BALAZIC wrote: > AFAIK the recent kernel has full support for the IDE hardware, so > the BIOS should not matter at all. ( except for booting ) > > I personally never had any such problems, > so this reports are a little bit confusing. > > On a related topic , what other parts of the BIOS are being > used or depended on by the linux kernel ?
Lately I'm having some serious problems with 20GB HD in P200MMX computer with PAM0057I motherboard.
After a while I've figured out, that Bios has huge impact on the working status of this drive WDC WD205BA.
The drive is working without any problems on Abit BP6 board. But on the PAM0057I board I almost couldn't use it. With 2.2.14pre3 kernel I couldn't boot even when all hdparm parameters are dissabled (=0). with 2.2.14pre11 I could at least boot this machine from this drive. On the other side - when this drive is on /dev/hdc position I could use it even with DMA (this is imposible when this drive is primary master) I discovered that DMA works on this drive, when there is "None" is the drive detection field in Bios. When there is "Auto" DMA doesn't work (however it works with smaller drives 2.5GB & 10GB) Of course I couldn't set "None" to the primary master.... So this drives runs with halve of speed without DMA.
Then I've also tryied to flash the Ami bios which I've found for this computer - with this Bios there were really no problems with drives - everything was running at least twice as fast - HD was giving 16MB/s on P200MMX 2.5 year old computer (BP6 gives me 19MB/s). The only problem was that serial ports and floppy drives were not working.
major difference was in this line: ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
While with older bios there were just pio modes.
So at least 2.2.XX series are heavily dependent on Bios. Is there something better with 2.3.X kernels ??? Is there a way I could achieve that marvelous performace with linux and without bios ???
-- Hi! I'm a .signature virus! Copy me into your ~/.signature to help me spread! Zdenek Kabelac http://i.am/kabi/ kabi@i.am {debian.org; fi.muni.cz}
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