OT: DMA troubles with Via KT600 chipset & hitachi hard drive

[Tom Georgoulias]

Last night I was helping a friend get a new system set up with Red Hat 
Linux 9 and noticed a problem that I was wondering if Fedora Core 1 will 
resolve.  It seems kinda pointless to download fc1 test 3 and try it at 
this moment in time, when the general release is just around the corner 
and we're very likely to migrate to that.  So I thought I'd ask for 
advice first.

While copying some RPMs from a CD to the hard drive, I noticed the copy 
took a really long time and ran "hdparm -Tt /dev/hda" to see what the 
transfer speeds were.  The buffered disk reads were somewhere in the 
neighborhood of 7MB/s, which lead me to believe DMA wasn't on.  hdparm 
and dmesg confirmed that.  I tried turning DMA on with hdparm to do some 
more testing, but I got the error:

HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted

We're running the latest RHL9 kernel, 2.4.20-20.9, a Hitachi 60GXP 
Deskstar drive, and using ATA-133 compatible cabling.  My suspicion is 
the motherboard, a Gigabyte 7VT600-L based on the Via KT600.  I'm not 
sure if the kernel we are using has support for a motherboard this new. 
  Searching Google produced quite a few hits, but most were pretty old 
and all seemed to suggest that IDE driver support was lacking in those 
instances.  So my question is, will the new Fedora Core 1 kernel have 
the support we need to get DMA working on this setup?

Thanks,
Tom
-- 
Tom Georgoulias
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