Re: libata - DMA problems ICH7 rev 02

From: Jan Niklas Hasse
Date: Mon May 12 2008 - 11:55:53 EST


On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 4:38 AM, Robert Hancock <hancockr@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> This is expected. IOWait just means the system is blocked waiting for IO
> and has nothing else to do. It does not mean that DMA is not working.
>
> [...]
>
> Looks like you are using DMA:
>
> ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
> ata1.01: configured for UDMA/33
>

Hm.. strange. But the problem is that my system slows down
nevertheless (sometimes the mouse cursor stops moving for a short time
or all my programs don't react). How can i find out what is causing
the problem?

Here I was creating a DVD with dvdauthor which was copying some big
video files. It was nearly impossible to use a web browser, although
CPU load seems only to be 12.7%.

top - 20:33:08 up 4:58, 2 users, load average: 2.94, 2.81, 2.49
Tasks: 134 total, 2 running, 132 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 5.0%us, 7.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 16.2%id, 70.1%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.8%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1019568k total, 996316k used, 23252k free, 1148k buffers
Swap: 2916344k total, 83892k used, 2832452k free, 325284k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2609 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 6 0.0 6:41.67 kcryptd
6344 root 20 0 543m 129m 10m S 3 13.0 6:33.63 Xorg
27062 jhasse 20 0 23164 6424 1176 D 3 0.6 0:11.98 dvdauthor
6891 jhasse 20 0 208m 18m 8956 S 2 1.9 3:13.41 transmission
27173 jhasse 20 0 263m 24m 12m S 2 2.4 0:00.66 gnome-terminal
195 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 1 0.0 0:00.14 pdflush

Another example: When I'm burning a disc and at the end, when my drive
finishes the disc (and makes those noises) the computer freezes untill
the CD is finished and ejected (about 3 seconds).

I hope it's the right place to ask here at the mailing list and thanks
for your help so far.
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