Re: disk corruptions on "tuned" disks Was: APM killing low-latency performance on BX mainboard

Benno Senoner (sbenno@gardena.net)
Thu, 11 Nov 1999 02:53:53 +0100


On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > It would be nice if we could collect some data about problematic
> > drives / mainboards.
> > Alan any know drives ?
>
> The problematic stuff is almost all ISA. That makes life hard. With PCI we
> can probe and pick up problem stuff (RZ1000 etc) The VIA VP1/VP2 are others
> with interesting issues (our DMA autotune code fails on them)
>
> > Is this more a harddisk issue or an mainboard issue ?
>
> IDE controller issue.

thanks.
>
> > On Pentium+ boxes, with not too old disks, the problem should be
> > pratically inexistent.
>
> Correct.

Is this true even for CDROMs in DMA mode
(DMAed CDROM drives on Pentium+ boxes bugfree or not ?)

Alan, how do you stand to this IDE CDROM DMA BUG ?
(pointed out by Dan Hollis)

>
> > But such an automatic tuning/check has soon to be implemented into distros,
> > in order to get the maximum performance out of the HW.
> > ( Or are you not willing to try out the 5th gear of your Ferrari ? :-) )
>
> Distributions have to work with as much hardware as possible.

Agreed, and that is the reason because you have to be careful
when doing the tuning.
But users with non-flawed hardware should be able to use the 5th gear.

It would be a bit disappointing to say:
"do not use the CDROM drive while usign your harddisk recording app,
because it might ruin your realtime performance"

>It's more a case
> of ensuring that the car delivered goes and the wheels don't fall off than
> the hand tuning it. The latter is _very_ hard.

Of course I agree 100% : the system should be reliabe and THEN efficient.
>
> Alan

Benno.

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