Disk I/O hogs CPU
I like to play Tremulous and listen to music in Amarok at the same time, however I noticed the game chokes when Amarok reads the next song from my 80GB SATA hard drive.
I thought this may be due to a lack of DMA, since without DMA data has to go through the CPU to get into RAM for playback, causing the game to choke. However, when I run hdparm I get: Code:
tuxmachine:~ # hdparm /dev/sda Using OpenSUSE 10.2 with KDE. |
For sata disks there exists the same application as hdparm, only they named it sdparm. But did you do the hdparm in root mode ? If you haven't .. try, because AFAIK hdparm should be able to tell you.
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Quote:
Code:
tuxmachine:~ # sdparm /dev/sda Code:
sdparm -a /dev/sda |
tuxmachine:~ # sdparm /dev/sda
# prompt means he is in root mode....:)) |
# sdparm -a /dev/hdc will not give any info about dma
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ok hdparm, doesn't tell you indeed. Anyway, about Amarok, do you perhaps have the OSD enabled? Where the picture in the above left corner pops up everytime a next song starts? This made my computer choke in games as well each time, i disabled it and gone we're my problems.
Also see output of: dmesg | grep ata should see a line like this: Code:
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x9F0 ctl 0xBF2 bmdma 0xE000 irq 20 |
Disabled OSD in Amarok, no difference.
And I do indeed see lines like that: :) Code:
tuxmachine:~ # dmesg | grep dma |
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