Slack 10.0 is very unstable => agpgart
 

Hello:
I'm a slack newbie and it is my first time to compile a kernel.
And I suspect I did not do it properly.

Symptoms are:
Frequent high level of hard drive activity, accompanied by loss of
system response to pointing device, kepad, and keyboard. Occurs for
both user and root.

Logs show references to problems with `agpgart`. Logs and .config (renamed to "config")
can be seen at http://www.johnsons-web.com/demo/slack/
There are also dumps available, "lspci.txt" is a dump of `lspci -v`.

any help would be appreciated.
thanks
tim

If you do a hdparm -d /dev/hda as root what does it say? Note that hda could also be hdc or hdb depending on where your primary harddrive is.

My primary hard drive is hda, slack partition is on hdb (should have mentioned that), sorry.

output for hdparm -d /dev/hda is
using_dma = 0 (off)
for hdb is the same.

On my RH 9.0 partition, using_dma is 'on'

Also, when booting the slack OS, I have noted that the system spends a noticeable lot of time
at the following message:
"updating shared library links:
/sbin/ldconfig"

thanks
tim

Ok.. I think I know what your problem is. Somehow you missed to add support for the harddrive controller on the motherboard. Without it dma gets disabled and thus causing a very slow harddrive access.

To make sure try and turn dma on using hdparm -d1 /dev/hdb
If nothing happens then the problem is missing controller support.

My bad, no doubt!
Here are results:
###############################################
`hdparm -d1 /dev/hdb`
# returns
/dev/hdb:
Setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed, operation not permitted.

#same sort of response for same operation on hda
HDIO_SET_DMA looks a lot like a `C` preprocessor directive
:study: OR a `.config` directive.

Thanks for the help so far!
What next?
tim

Googling for help for your specific motherboard chipset (nForce2) brings me to this site:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-3418.html

Going back through your kernel shows that you've not enabled this at all:

So! Compile that module into your kernel and let us know how it goes =)

- Piete.

Thanks very much to all for the help! It's also a good learning experience.
Will report back when done.
cheers
tim

Yeay, it's smokin' now.
Settings for menuconfig were:
ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support ==> IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices
----AMD and nVidia IDE support
--------AMD Viper ATA-66 Override

Thanks to all for the help.
tim