Hey folks,

I've been going round and round with this problem for over a week now and haven't found any solutions yet. I thought I'd post about it here and see if anyone has run across this before. Thanks in advance for any input/ideas!

I have an IDE drive on my system where all my Linux distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, SuSE, and Slackware) are installed. All the distros give similar hdparm stats, with the exception of Slackware. No amount of hdparm tweaking has any effect. This drive performs at less than 1/10th the access rate in Slack than it does in any other distro.

My buffered access rate in all the other distros is around 57M. In Slack it's only 4.7M. This is killing my Slackware. It's slooooooowwwww and jerky.

Is it possible Slack just doesn't like my hardware? I find that hard to believe when all the other distros have no problems with it. I'm using the bare.i kernel.

Any ideas?

~Eric

is DMA on? can you try and see if it works? If not what does it say?

Hi cb...

Yeah, I'm way beyond all that. Actually, since posting this last night, I believe I found the culprit to this bugaboo. It was an error on my part (figures, huh? ). Anyway, when I installed Slack, I formatted the partitions with ReiserFS. However, I forgot to make an initrd.gz to boot to. I've been booting straight into vmlinuz. That's not gonna' work with ReiserFS. I believe this is what is causing this performance problem with the drive. In a little while, I'm going to correct my error. I'll see how that affects the performance.

Thanks for the hdparm tip, though.

~Eric

I really don't think this is related to reiserfs since I don't use any initrd image to boot to a reiserfs root.

Well, it solved my problem.

According to numerous sources and Volkerding's own README on the installation CD, in order to use ReiserFS in Slack, you must boot to initrd for the ReiserFS module to be loaded into the kernel. But hey... whaddo I know? I've only been at this for about 5 months now. All I know is that reinstalling on ext3 partitions solved the problem. Slack is blazing fast on this drive now.

Thanks for your input, cb!

Have a good one!

~Eric

well I'm glad you figured it out
enjoy slack

Once I get proficient enough in Slack, it'll probably become my default OS. Right now my default is Ubuntu. I have no complaints with Ubuntu, but Slack is COOL!

Later....

~Eric