Topic: Promise IDE ATA/133 PCI Card PDC20269

[Shaun Port]

I was wondering if anyone has this working? or knows how to get it working?

Promise IDE ATA/133 PCI Card PDC20269. I had it working fine in Red Hat 7.3, just didn't know if there was a way to get it working with e-smith.

Thanks,

Shaun

[Gary Parker]

Hi Shaun...I've got a similar card (with a PDC20268 chip) waiting to go into my e-smith box. It *is* possible to get it working, after a fashion, but you won't be able to enable DMA xfers on any attached drives so you'll get crap performance out of it.

This is because the kernel shipped with 5.1.2 doesn't directly support the chipset on the Promise cards. The 2.4 kernel (included with RH7.3) has support compiled in out of the box (I've run a hacked e-smith with this kernel and performance was great) and will hopefully be a part of SME 5.2 when it comes out.

Hope that helps....

Gary

[Shaun Port]

Thank you very much for that info...

I just installed everything yesterday and I was quite impressed. I can't wait until this Promise card is suported

Take care,

Shaun

[Urvin Wernink]

I've read your reply and  you managed to get the promise ide 133 pci card working. How exactly did you do this? It is possible for you to write a how-to. I spend many days figuring out what packaged I had to install. Recompile my kernel etc. But still not working. I initally bought a ultra 133tx2 but did not succeed in get it working. Therefore I bought a ultra 100 tx2, got it to work but DMA hard drive acces is still not working. The performance was not good. But with A LOT of samba tweaking the performance is not that bad. But it could be 100 times better if I could that damn DMA working.

[Steve]

I am having the same problem with a pdc20268.  I will disable dma support as suggested above.  I am using the 5.6 developer release and see same performance loss as with 5.5.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.


Steve