Re: dma turned off

Jim Nelson
2004-11-11T04:30:16Z

Peter H. wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Slackware 10
>
> When I switch to kernel 2.6.7 I get the following error message on boot:
>
> * Warning: The dma on your hard drive is turned off. *
> * This may really slow down the fsck process. *
>
> Apparently with the command "hdparm -d /dev/hda" dma is turned on.
>
> Where in /etc/rc.d if that is the place do I put this command?
>
> However, giving the command from the console as root after booting I get:
>
> setting using_dma to 1 (on)
> HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
> using_dma = 0 (off)
>
> How to resolve?
>
> Thanks & regards

What kind of hard drive and IDE chipset does it have? I know some drives were
recently added to a no-DMA blacklist for behaving badly. Normally, dma is
supposed to be enabled by default, and only disabled when a known-bad hard drive
or IDE controller is found.

On my Slack 10.0 server, I put hdparm in rc.local. My rc.local:

(most of the disk storage is on SCSI drives, /dev/hda is just the boot drive due
to a POS BIOS that can't boot off of expansion cards)

#!/bin/sh
#
# /etc/rc.d/rc.local: Local system initialization script.
#
# Put any local setup commands in here:

# enable 32-bit mode, turn on APM, set spindown for 1 hour,
# unmask IRQ's, nd set the keep-settings flag for /dev/hda
hdparm -c 1 -B 128 -S 242 -u 1 -k -q /dev/hda

# get the date from VT's NTP server and start the local time server
ntpdate ntp-1.vt.edu
ntpd &

#start the SMART monitoring tools
smartd &