pata_ninja32 plea

pata_ninja32 plea

[bbee]

Hi,

I was looking for a way to add SSD to my laptop, while keeping the capacity 
of the hard disk (250G) available. I spotted a CF->Cardbus card in a shop 
and found that it was supported by pata_ninja32 and delkin_cb. The card is 
branded Delock, it identifies as: "Workbit Corporation Device [1145:f021]".

What I didn't realize then was that the drivers only offer PIO support. 
With a Transcend 16G 133x CF card, I can get the card to write at ~3Mb/s 
and read at ~6-7Mb/s sequential with the old IDE driver, which would be 
fine were it not for the fact that it makes the system lag like mad, using 
100% CPU.
In Windows it gets ~10Mb/s perfomance with <25% CPU load.

With the perf it has in Windows, it would make an excellent root drive and 
a great upgrade path to SSD for slightly older laptops like mine.

The windows driver is 27Kb, the OSX one is ~100Kb. Somewhere in those 27K 
is something that will make it perform great on linux, all it would take is 
someone with a lot more clue than me to take a look at it.

Anyone willing to take a look? Alan?

Thanks,

bbee


Windows benchmark:

    Sequential Read :   10.806 MB/s
   Sequential Write :    8.047 MB/s
  Random Read 512KB :   10.728 MB/s
Random Write 512KB :    1.537 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB :    7.408 MB/s
   Random Write 4KB :    0.013 MB/s

          Test Size : 100 MB

Re: pata_ninja32 plea

[Alan Cox]

> is something that will make it perform great on linux, all it would take is 
> someone with a lot more clue than me to take a look at it.
> 
> Anyone willing to take a look? Alan?

There is siome minimal information in the FreeBSD driver but they never
got DMA to work properly AFAIK. If you want DMA support you'll have to go
do the work to document DMA mode and I suspect it would be quite
substantial work.

Alan

Re: pata_ninja32 plea

[Tejun Heo]

Alan Cox wrote:
>> is something that will make it perform great on linux, all it would take is 
>> someone with a lot more clue than me to take a look at it.
>>
>> Anyone willing to take a look? Alan?
> 
> There is siome minimal information in the FreeBSD driver but they never
> got DMA to work properly AFAIK. If you want DMA support you'll have to go
> do the work to document DMA mode and I suspect it would be quite
> substantial work.

~10MB/s w/ < 25% cpu load doesn't sound like DMA.  It sounds more like
32bit PIO, no?

-- 
tejun