i just finished upgrading to the 2.6.8 kernel and everything went as planned and everything's working as it should, except the fact that the box seems a little sluggish. i'm running on a 333 Mhz Celeron processor with about 198 megs of RAM. it's a slow box but its become a lot slower than when i was originally on 2.4.6...
any suggestions...

TIA

Its been a while since I compiled my own kernel, but I do remember something similar happening to me. I didn't compile in support for my chipset and when I would do "hdparm /dev/hda" it would return about 3.00 MB/sec. So then I re-compiled with support for my chipset and ran the same command and it came back at 40.00 MB/sec. Might be worth looking into

i tried to run hdparm to enable DMA and this is what i get when i type in the command:

bash-2.05b# hdparm -X69 -d1 -u1 /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
setting unmaskirq to 1 (on)
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
setting xfermode to 69 (UltraDMA mode5)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 0 (off)


i use a QUANTUM FIREBALLlct08 08, ATA DISK drive
and when i was compiling the kernel it didn't have a kernel module for that specific drive....
since its not letting me enable dma what should i do ? any suggestions ...

TIA

I have a Asus A7VE motherboard, in order to get DMA enabled and get a decent return with hdparm, I had to compile in support for my chipset
under ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support ---> when I did a "make menuconfig". Like I said it has been a while, but what you're experiencing sounds a lot like what I was going through. HTH. If not, I'll let someone more knowledgeable try to help you out. Good luck!

thanks for replying back, i'll try to recompile the kernel again and wrestle with for a bit, if i give up, i'll just go back to 2.4.6

If you switch from 2.4 to 2.6, you have to reformat your swap partition.

are you serious?

Yes WMD is right, but it's the swap partition, you won't loose any data

Just use this (you don't need to reboot), BUT MAKE SURE hdXX IS YOUR SWAP PARTITION:
swapoff /dev/hdXX
mkswap -v1 /dev/hdXX
swapon /dev/hdXX

what if i went from 2.4 to 2.6 back to 2.4
do i still need to delete it?

If i'm not wrong, no, search the web to be 100% sure, but as far as I know 2.4.X fully supports swap version 1, I know you need swap v0 for 2.2 and lower.