Hey guys, just a quick on this time. Installed Xine last night and it is running a little laggy. I suspect that it is because my DVD drive is in PIO mode as opposed to DMA. Is there anyway i can see what the DVD drive is running in? and if so, how can i change it to DMA?
Cheers

(PS I manually set it to DMA in the BIOS last night)

Have you tryied "hdparm"?
Take a look at man hdparm to see all the options, but I think you'll need the -d option.

Marcelo

Ok I tried what you said , and it seems like the right command but this is what i get when i try to enable DMA:

bash-2.05b# hdparm -d 1 /dev/cdrom

/dev/cdrom:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)

any ideas?

mmm
maybe this is paranoia, but was your disk not mounted?
maybe being even more paranoic, try /dev/hdc (or hdb, or hdd) instead of /dev/cdrom

Marcelo

I tried it both with the drive mounted and unmounted, and also tried hdc along with cdrom .. still get the same error

EDIT: Actually looking at my HD that is not using DMA mode either . I fear i may have to recompile the kernel? I recently upgrade to 2.6.1

Hey, did you manage to get that working? I recently hat to turn my DMA on too, and I had to recompile my kernel, to include the proper module for my ide chip. It now works ok. ;P
Sorry 'bout taking soo long to really help...

Marcelo

lol it's cool. And yeah i ended up recompiling the kernel and adding the correct module and now it all runs fine. Only prob is, is that say i reboot the computer i have to manually enable DMA mode. Is there somewhere i can add it so it automatically enables DMA on boot?

Theres no space between the d and 1 but I'm sure that was just a typo... Put this into /etc/rc.d/rc.local

/usr/sbin/hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc

I think thats the correct path. I'm at work in windass right now... I also optimize hda in rc.local as well.... try something like this

/usr/sbin/hdparm -d1 -A1 -m16 -u1 -a64 -c1 -X69 /dev/hda

Theres a -k1 switch that will keep the settings on a soft reboot but if you completely shut it down, you'll lose it...
run

hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

before and after setting that.. It's amazing the increase in transfer rates you can pull out of your hard drive... All newer hard drives can cope with that setting. The X switch sets udma to 5... Thats all my drive can handle. Play around with it and see what settings are best for your hardware. Its suggested to mess with it in init1 but I always do it from X.... Up to you..

Jon

Cheers mate, will give what you said a go and see what I come up with.

hi, just wondering where would i have to check to get my driver in the menuconfig part?

Device Drivers---> ATA/ATAPI/MFM/RLL support--->

Have to enable:

Generic PCI bus-master DMA support
and
Use PCI DMA by default when available

along with your specific chipset support....

for my CD Bruner i tried

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdd

/dev/hdd:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)

furthermore i tried

hdparm -c1d1X66 /dev/hdd

-> the same result

the same thing happens when i try to enable dma for my dvd drive(which is hdb)

my hardisks both run in udma mode 5 (hda, hdc)

what am I doing wrong?
please help me!
because burning with 8x instead of 40x is not funny!
and watching dvds is not possible now!