I recently bought a new Compaq Evo N600c laptop with a fairly new Intel
IDE chipset on it (attaching dmesg and lspci output), and I ran into
problems with enabling DMA on it. After asking Compaq support I only got
an answer that Linux wasn't supported on this unit.
Later I found a couple of helpful engineers from the ProLiant server
team who installed Linux on a similar laptop to see if they could
reproduce the problem, and they did.
I started worrying I would have to return the laptop and just get
another one that was known to work. This was when Arjan hooked me up
with Andre on irc and things started going the right way :)
After mailing the attached output from dmesg and lspci he produced a
patch that made the machine work in record time. So I went from thinking
this was a hopeless situation to being told it was just a plain bug in
one day and I'm now a _very_ happy camper looking forward to solving the
other problems I have on the new laptop.
Great work Andre! And thanks to the Compaq guys who have spent time
helping out.
Patch will be up at http://linuxdiskcert.org/ shortly I'm told.
Cheers
Kjartan Maraas
PS. I tried 2.5.11 and that didn't work at all. I got the same warnings
during startup and a total hang later in the boot process. Poke me if
you want more details on that.