Very Computer

Hi all,

I just bought an IBM Thinkpad R40 and installed Debian Sarge (testing)
on it (kernel 2.4.22-1-686). Everything went smoothly, but there is one
issue that makes me a bit unhappy: the Linux kernel boots extremely
slowly from the harddisk! So when you see the very first message
"Loading Linux ..." and the roughly 50 dots increase from left to right,
it takes more than a minute until the kernel is loaded (on other laptops
or desktop PCs it takes not longer than 5 seconds). Once the kernel is
loaded the normal startup is as fast as I expect. So for me it looks
like the the harddisk is extremely slow until the DMA is activated by
the kernel.

Unfortunately there is nothing to configure in the BIOS concerning PIO
modes or DMA. I tried different boot options (like ide0=dma etc.) but
without any success.

Any ideas would be helpful.

Thanks in advance, Joerg.

--

Forum: http://www.morbitzer.de/cgi-bin/cutecast/cutecast.pl

Quote:>I just bought an IBM Thinkpad R40 and installed Debian Sarge (testing)
>on it (kernel 2.4.22-1-686). Everything went smoothly, but there is one
(snip)
>Any ideas would be helpful.

-- Mark

Quote:>I just bought an IBM Thinkpad R40 and installed Debian Sarge (testing)
>on it (kernel 2.4.22-1-686). Everything went smoothly, but there is one
>issue that makes me a bit unhappy: the Linux kernel boots extremely
>slowly from the harddisk! So when you see the very first message
>"Loading Linux ..." and the roughly 50 dots increase from left to right,
>it takes more than a minute until the kernel is loaded (on other laptops
>or desktop PCs it takes not longer than 5 seconds). Once the kernel is
>loaded the normal startup is as fast as I expect. So for me it looks
>like the the harddisk is extremely slow until the DMA is activated by
>the kernel.

>Unfortunately there is nothing to configure in the BIOS concerning PIO
>modes or DMA. I tried different boot options (like ide0=dma etc.) but
>without any success.

>Any ideas would be helpful.

  compact

to /etc/lilo.conf and rerunning lilo. This turns on map compaction so
that adjacent reads can be merged into a single read when lilo loads
the kernel. It doesn't work on all bioses though which is why it isn't
on by default. Any recent bios should be ok.

Phil

--
http://www.kantaka.co.uk/ .oOo. public key: http://www.kantaka.co.uk/gpg.txt

Quote:

> It's probably nothing to do with DMA. Some bioses are really slow at
> doing disc access. Try adding the line

>   compact

> to /etc/lilo.conf and rerunning lilo. This turns on map compaction so
> that adjacent reads can be merged into a single read when lilo loads
> the kernel. It doesn't work on all bioses though which is why it isn't
> on by default. Any recent bios should be ok.

Kind regards, Joerg.

--

Forum: http://www.morbitzer.de/cgi-bin/cutecast/cutecast.pl