From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Karl Auerbach Subject: Re: Some IDE issues with 2.6.28 on PC-Engines ALIX2 Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:23:16 -0800 Message-ID: <49629664.9050604@iwl.com> References: <49615667.9020408@iwl.com> <20090105113642.19679726@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from puck.iwl.com ([64.62.206.91]:45449 "EHLO puck.iwl.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751226AbZAEXX0 (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Jan 2009 18:23:26 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20090105113642.19679726@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org To: Alan Cox Cc: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org, karl@cavebear.com Alan Cox wrote: >> 2. The cs5535 ide driver doesn't seem to be able to recognize the >> newer CS5536 controller for IDE. > > Switch to libata as most distributions have already done and enable the > pata_cs5536 driver, which is designed for this hardware. Thanks for the suggestion - It made a *big* difference. Here's a couple of timings (sequential reads from the CF) that show the difference in performance. I didn't do writes because I'm never sure what various CF's do inside and don't have confidence that seemingly similar CF writes have consistent times. Using the generic IDE driver: [root@board-1 /root]# time dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/null bs=512 3572352+0 records in 3572352+0 records out real 16m 18.64s user 0m 0.76s sys 1m 28.08s Using the PATA CS5536 driver: [root@board-1 /root]# time dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/null bs=512 3572352+0 records in 3572352+0 records out real 1m 11.41s user 0m 0.47s sys 0m 3.56s In other words, on sequential reads, I'm seeing a roughly 13x fold improvement in clock time and an 11x improvement in sys+user cpu. [It also seemed to fix another weird thing that started with 2.6.28, the disappearance of the stdout from linuxrc and rc.sysinit - the kernel messages still hit the console but the stuff from those two startup scripts went into never never land (even though, as apparent from their side effects, they still executed properly.)] I guess I now need to go through my system and make sure that any hard coded "hda" are changed to "sda". As for the other issues mentioned during this very helpful discussion, of which I comprehended about 50%: Do folks still want me to try that patch? (Now that the problem I've been having seems fixed, and being lazy by nature, I'll do it if it is helpful but otherwise I'd prefer to skip it.) As for the question of why I have the SD driver - The ALIX2 boards (which, by the way are Geode LX, not the older Geode) has USB and I want to sometimes plug external USB drives into 'em. I thought that the SD driver is needed for that, am I in error? By-the-way, I'm happy (modulo my previously mentioned lazy nature) to run tests on ALIX2 and ALIX3 boards should anyone need it. Thanks, --karl-- Karl Auerbach Santa Cruz, CA http://www.cavebear.com/