Mark Cooke wrote:
> If I run a simultaneous one on hdc and hde, the combined rate tops
> out at 50MB again. Hence, the limitation isn't the raid card. Or at
> least I'd be exceedingly surprised.
>
The bugs that exist in VIA chipsets and Barracuda drives have already
exceedingly surprised me many, many times :-)
I have done some dumping on the via chipset and this what I've come up
with is available (in a cooked format) at:
http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~i99_hnd/via/
I hope that this is useful in some way for you?.
Regards,
David
On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, David H?rdeman wrote:
> Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2002 18:33:04 +0200
> From: David H?rdeman <[email protected]>
> To: Mark Cooke <[email protected]>
> Cc: LinuxKernel <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: Kernel 2.4.17 with VT8367 [KT266] crashes on heavy ide load
> togeter
>
> Mark Cooke wrote:
>
> > If I run a simultaneous one on hdc and hde, the combined rate tops
> > out at 50MB again. Hence, the limitation isn't the raid card. Or at
> > least I'd be exceedingly surprised.
>
> The bugs that exist in VIA chipsets and Barracuda drives have already
> exceedingly surprised me many, many times :-)
Agreed.
> I have done some dumping on the via chipset and this what I've come up
> with is available (in a cooked format) at:
> http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~i99_hnd/via/
>
> I hope that this is useful in some way for you?.
Yes. It's interesting that comparing the differences in north bridge
registers between windows unpatched, and the latest 1.05 raid patch is
just register 0xb7 changing. Perhaps I'll be 'brave/foolish' and just
twiddle it with setpci after backing up. Do you have documentation
for these registers ? I've been kicking through via's site looking
for chipset datasheets to no avail.
I toasted one of my raid disks trying to get Win98se installed over
the weekend to do similar testing here. Didn't like the size of the
disk I tried to install it to, and I ended up with a zapped partition
table and who knows what else. Thankfully the software raid 5 coped
perfectly (thanks guys!) and the system was back after the rebuild
time.
I've a spare (small) disk to try this with my system today or
tomorrow. Which ABit bios are you using on that test system currently
? I put the newest ABios bios (7P vs 65) on my system (KT7A-RAID
v1.3) and it appears to have gained me about 3-4MB/sec over the PCI
bus. (54MB/sec vs 50MB/sec)
Attached files are my raw pci data for 00:0 and 00:1, for your
reference. It's different enough to your data that it's not easy
to compare though.
Cheers,
Mark
--
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Mark Cooke The views expressed above are mine and are not
Systems Programmer necessarily representative of university policy
University Of Birmingham URL: http://www.sr.bham.ac.uk/~mpc/
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
On Mon, 01 Apr 2002, Mark Cooke wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Apr 2002, David H?rdeman wrote:
> > Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2002 18:33:04 +0200
> > From: David H?rdeman <[email protected]>
> > To: Mark Cooke <[email protected]>
> > Cc: LinuxKernel <[email protected]>
> > Subject: Re: Kernel 2.4.17 with VT8367 [KT266] crashes on heavy ide load
> > togeter
> >
> > Mark Cooke wrote:
> > > If I run a simultaneous one on hdc and hde, the combined rate tops
> > > out at 50MB again. Hence, the limitation isn't the raid card. Or at
> > > least I'd be exceedingly surprised.
> >
> > The bugs that exist in VIA chipsets and Barracuda drives have already
> > exceedingly surprised me many, many times :-)
Yes. For the VIA side, I have this in my rc.S stuff:
#!/bin/sh
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
export PATH
echo -n "Optimizing hardware configuration: "
if command -v setpci >/dev/null 2>&1; then
echo -n "PCI"
#
# Optimize PCI latency for IDE controllers
#
setpci -d 1106:0571 latency_timer=60 >/dev/null 2>&1
setpci -d 105a:* latency_timer=60 >/dev/null 2>&1
echo "."
else
echo '(lspci/setpci not available!)'
fi
Normal latency set by the BIOS is 32, which is too damn small for IDE.
You may have to tweak the PCI ids a bit. You want all storage controllers
(both chipset, Promise and any extra cards). The IDs up there are for my VIA
kt133, and Promise PDC20265.
Oh, some of the PCI 'optimizations' in BIOS must be enabled for that to
actually help a bit. Stuff like the PCI caches.
VIA PCI is utter crap. I am not buying anything of theirs ever again :(
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh