Re: ICH6M SATA Controller, SATA2 NCQ disk and high iowait CPU time

From: Tejun Heo
Date: Sun Nov 26 2006 - 22:35:55 EST


gary.czek wrote:
Hi, I have problem with my notebook Fujitsu-Siemens V8010. It has Intel
ICH6M chipset with SATA Controller. And SATA II disk Fujitsu MHT2040BH
with NCQ. If there is request on disk, iowait time of CPU gets to 100%
and whole system gets totally unresponsible. For example apt upgrade (of
average 10 packages totaling 30MB in .debs) gets 30 minutes. CPU iowait
time gets about 95% for whole 30 minutes.

My notebook details:
CPU: Intel Celeron M 1,4GHz
MEM: 256MB 333MHz
HDD: Fujitsu MHT2040BH SATA II, NCQ, 5400rpm, 8MB buffer
SWP: 512MB swap partition
Chipset: ICH6M 82801FBM
GPU: Intel i915GM integrated

kernel: 2.6.19-rc5
SATA Controller/disk driver: ata_piix and ahci tested, but results of
both were almost the same.

1. does 'mount -o remount,barrier=0 /' change anything?

2. 256MB is really small if you're running modern desktop environment. Please post the result of 'vmstat 5' while the machine is really slow.

--
tejun
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