Topic: hdparm SME Server 7pre4/3

[btech]

Hi Everyone -

I am running a fresh install of SME Server 7(pre4) on a 939N4FG (with a dula core AMD 64), which has an nforce4 chipset.  I have had numerous drive problems, first with SATA (Journal errors on good drives) and after replacing these with IDE, I am having more somewhat similar problems.

I finally discovered hdparm (I use FreeBSD which installs with all optimizations active, such as DMA) and I *may* have corrected the strange timeouts followed by comlpete system hang by changing multcount to 16 - I won't know for a day or two.  

However, I cannot change turn DMA on with hdparm -u1 -d1 -X34 /dev/hda - I get HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted.  This is intended as a file server and the drive perfomance is lousy (4.8 MB/sec) due to the lack of DMA, I hope!  After some research, it looks as if most people need to recompile a kernel with necessary drivers to get around this, so:

1. How do I recompile the kernel in SME Server 7pre4?  /usr/src/redhat has a bunch of empty directories...
2. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might be able to overcome these hard drive errors without recompiling the kernel?

Thanks,
Jeff

[Reinhold]

btech,

You do possibly own an especially unfortunate mixture of hardware...

Have a look here: http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/nforce/amd64/1.0-0306/KnownProblems.html
"2. The IDE class driver will not be able to use DMA, which results in lower IDE performance.
This can be worked around by patching the driver with the appropriate device IDs."

In general go have a long&good look at
NVIDIA nForce Linux Drivers
...and download whatever it is you need from the nVidia site Linux dump

Having been in the nvidia-linux-swamp once I sure wish you good luck.

Regards
Reinhold

[Reinhold]

I almost forgot:

When I had problems I did contact:
linux-nforce-bugs@nvidia.com

and they did answer (which however would not fix the problem )

Regards
Reinhold

[btech]

Hi Reinhold -

Thanks for your reply.  Thios morning, as every morning on this system, I hev another Journal commit I/O error and system hang.  I think I am going to remove SME Server, which seems to simply not work on this system, and use FreeBSD 6 instead.  Just recompiling the kernel under SME7 appears to be a pain that I don't have the time for.

Thanks,
Jeff