Jan Gutter wrote:
> Our company has recently purchased two Acer 5632WSMi laptops and we're
> running Gentoo x86 unstable on them. The most hindering problem that's
> currently plaguing us is the IDE chipset. 
> 
> Without the combined_mode=libata on the command line, DMA is disabled
> and the hard drive just uses PIO. With libata, it hangs up randomly,
> causing the driver to eventually clock down to PIO mode too.
> 
> I'd be willing to test patches (like really INSANE ones), because the
> laptop's not too critical currently. I can post the full dmesg and lspci
> -vvnn if it might be of use. I have no idea whether this problem has
> been solved or reported before.

Please apply the attached patch over 2.6.19 and report what the kernel says.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun