Inspiron 6000 DVD DMA Issue
 

Hey all,

I have had an Inspiron 6000 since this summer and I've managed to get everything working on it, except my DVD drive. I cannot enable DMA, so DVD play back is incredibly choppy.

I believe I read that this was due to a lack of SATA pass through support. Then I heard that this was added in the 2.6.15 kernel. I downloaded and compiled the new kernel, but I haven't seen any change in performance and I'm still not able to enable DMA on my DVD drive.

I'm not sure if I missed something in my .config file for the kernel. Or perhaps I still need to be passing a kernel parameter in LILO to enable what I need to be able to enable DMA on my DVD drive. Has anyone managed to fix this? I think the problem is common across many of the Inspiron laptops, not just the 6000.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,
Chris

I'm using an Inspiron 4100.
Enabled DMA with hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc
hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

I put these two in /etc/rc.d/rc.local

IIRC I once had a problem with choppy playback, think I solved it with install of libdvdread, libdvdnav, libdvdcss, ln -sf /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd and/or permissions. Can't remember which one fixed it.

Did you run xine-check?

Hello!

I'll try to find you a patch, but I remember I used a patch that reverts the 2.6 kernel back to using IDE controller, where DMA can be controlled. Sata never worked right for me on the Dell Inspiron 6000. Now, everything is fine. I can even dual boot with 2.4 kernels.

Reply if you want me find you the patch,

Murdock

I would really like to use the 2.6 kernel, perferable the newest 2.6.15 kernel. If the patch works with this kernel, then please post it. :)

Thanks a lot!

Do a search on google for:

ich6m-pciid-piix.patch

You'll find a lot of info about it.

check out www.linux-on-laptops.org to see how many have installed SW on Inspirons . Have fun!

There are no entries for people who have installed Slackware on the Inspiron 6000.

I did find the patch using Google, but how do I go about applying it to my kernel sources? I've never actually applied patches to a kernel, I always just compiled it by itself.

Thanks :)

You download a file and use a patch command
with the syntax:

patch -p0 < patch-file-name-here

The patch command finds the file name automatically, but go to
http://www.linuxhq.com/patch-howto.html to find out more. It is really simple.

However, as I recall there were two patches and one worked for me while the other gave me errors. So go ahead with your patch and if that doesn't work I'll email you the one I used.

Later,
Murdock

OK, I tried that. This is the output I got:

Also one of the top lines in the patch file was:

diff -ur a/drivers/ide/pci/piix.c linux-2.6.12/drivers/ide/pci/piix.c

and the kernel I am trying to compile this with is the 2.6.15 kernel, so I just replaced the '2.6.12' with '2.6.15'. Will this not work? If I must I will use the 2.6.12 kernel, but I'd prefer to use a newer one. I know the 2.6.15 kernel has a relatively new version of the ipw2200 module with it, which is why I was hoping to keep that one.

Thanks,
Chris

edit: I just tried applying the patch to a 2.6.12 kernel source and it gives me the same output. I used the directions on the LinuxHQ site.

DMA issue
 

chrysmo please look at that linux on laptop site for installs on lappy similar to yours. Several of the posts discuss how they handled your issue. It will be work well worthwhile. Cheers.

lestoil,

I just went through them again and some of them mention the libata passthrough patch. All of them use kernel 2.6.11 or earlier, which is rather old now.

I tried Google'ing for information on a patch for the 2.6.15 kernel, but what I think I'm getting is that the patch is included in the 2.6.15 kernel, yet I'm still not able to enable DMA on my drive.

Back to the patch:

Hmm, I have 6.2.14 and it patched fine, so don't despair, you'll get it working.

Try going to the directory with the file when patching.

Keep us updated,
Murdock

OK, it seemed to patch just fine. However, when I tried compiled the kernel the piix.c file gave me a number of errors and then failed. Murdoc, would you mind sending me the patch you used? My e-mail address is chryzmo at gmail dot com.

I will compile the 2.6.14 kernel, since that's what worked for you.

Thanks,
Chris

I'll do it...however switch the @ to an at so you won't get spammed.

Later Dude,
Murdock

Will this patch work for 2.6.15?
 

I noticed in 2.6.15 that:
PCI_DEVICE_ID_INTEL_ICH6_5

Isn't defined in include/linux/pci_ids.h
Actually quite a few ID_INTEL_ICH6 are missing compare to 2.6.14..
So I'm not sure if re-defining ICH6_5 isn't going to be dangerous.

So anybody to share experience with this patch with 2.6.15 or should I stay with the 2.6.14 that comes with FC4 ?

I haven't been able to get my DVD drive to work properly on my machine, disabling the IDE device so the DVD appears on the SCSI/SATA channel is rather unstable , often Xine/VLC will not see the DVD at all.

Thanks
JY