Re: amd64 cdrom access locks system

David C. Young
2005-08-09T07:48:00Z

This is in response to Jeff Wiegley () cyte ! com problem with amd64 and
ide cdrom. I tried to contact him directly but the email bounced. I
apologize in advance for using kernel list bandwidth to address this.

Jeff,

I have a amd64 running on a Asus board (K8V SE Deluxe) and I have been
having problems similar to your cdrom lockups. The board has on-board
IDE/ATA and SATA. I am only using two SATA drives and one DVD/CD burner
on the secondary IDE/ATA connector.

The system lockups occurred with kde (all the time) and gnome
(occasionally). I killed the haldaemon and went through 2.6.12.[0-3]
but I would access, or the haldaemon would access, the cdrom and
/dev/hdc would lock up, the system would slow down and occasionally lock
up (in particular during cd-burning). I got logs full of drive busy,
drive opcode unknown and drive not ready followed by ATAPI resets. The
situation was better but not fixed completely when I disabled the haldaemon.

I solved my cdrom/ide problem by building a custom kernel. I haven't
gone back to check all the permutations but I continued having problems
until I disabled scsi cdrom support. I left generic scsi and disk
support on but once the scsi cdrom support was eliminated the slowdowns
and/or lockups went away. I did get one error message from trying to
access past the end of the drive when I tried to mount a blank cd. Past
that, my logs are clean of /dev/hdc problems.

It seems to me that the ide-ata works fine in burning mode and the
generic scsi cdrom support just confuses the issue. That is only my
opinion and I don't profess to be a kernel hack. I do burn iso images
fairly often and my command is:
cdrecord dev=/dev/hdc fs=16MB -eject <filename>

Also, I make sure the cpu is running at full speed instead of power
saving mode and I run as root for the actual burning.

Hope this helps,

David