Large Hard Drives and DMA
I know this has been discussed on and off this forum for a while. I have decided to put a large HDD (250gb Maxtor maxline II) in my home server, running suse 9.1.
With the plain out of the box kernel 2-6-4 it would only ever see 137Gb of the drive, complaining that LBA48 could not be used during boot, The IDE controller is ALi M5229.
After some Googling I found that a bug fix has been incorporated into kernel 2-6-9, which now installed and working allows access to the whole drive, but only in PIO mode, during boot it tells me <137Gb will be DMA and above will be PIO which is slow and really hogs the processor when asked to do some thing. I get numerous DMA timeout errors during boot up, the system will eventually boot, allowing me DMA with HDA and PIO with HDB (my new one). I am booting the system specifying NOAPIC and NOALPIC, which marginally helps.
Does any one know of a solution that will allow this setup to run DMA on both drives, or any fixes or things to try. Its OK and stable, just slow.
Thanks for any replies.
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