Re: ICH6M SATA Controller, SATA2 NCQ disk and high iowait CPU time

Tejun Heo
2006-11-27T03:19:26Z

gary.czek wrote:
> Hi, I have problem with my notebook Fujitsu-Siemens V8010. It has Intel
> ICH6M chipset with SATA Controller. And SATA II disk Fujitsu MHT2040BH
> with NCQ. If there is request on disk, iowait time of CPU gets to 100%
> and whole system gets totally unresponsible. For example apt upgrade (of
> average 10 packages totaling 30MB in .debs) gets 30 minutes. CPU iowait
> time gets about 95% for whole 30 minutes.
>
> My notebook details:
> CPU: Intel Celeron M 1,4GHz
> MEM: 256MB 333MHz
> HDD: Fujitsu MHT2040BH SATA II, NCQ, 5400rpm, 8MB buffer
> SWP: 512MB swap partition
> Chipset: ICH6M 82801FBM
> GPU: Intel i915GM integrated
>
> kernel: 2.6.19-rc5
> SATA Controller/disk driver: ata_piix and ahci tested, but results of
> both were almost the same.

1. does 'mount -o remount,barrier=0 /' change anything?

2. 256MB is really small if you're running modern desktop environment.
Please post the result of 'vmstat 5' while the machine is really slow.

--
tejun