I filed a bug report on this (or seemingly this) a long long time ago when it was a pure redhat problem. At the time I found that both Gnome and KDE have this problem. I also found the solution, turn off magicdev off. I've documented this (and other problems on the 8200) on http://www.astro.umd.edu/~teuben/linux/laptop/dell8200.html but i should update this and link the bugzilla ID in there. I haven't recently checked what the status of this bug is.... - peter On Mon, 15 Nov 2004, Ismael Juma wrote: > Hi, > > I have been experiencing some odd behaviour (major slowdowns) in my > laptop for some weeks now. After some investigation it turned out that > hard disk performance was the reason. My buffered reads were way below > the average when running hdparm -tT /dev/hda. However, this only > occurred at some points in time. Since it was hard to reproduce I did > not report the problem. > > Yesterday I have finally been able to narrow down the cause of the > problem. This slowdown occurs if my cd-rom drive is open or if there is > no disk in it. Even though I don't understand how this is possible, the > figures from hdparm -tT /dev/hda follow: > > With a cd in the cd-rom drive (average of three runs): > /dev/hda: > Timing cached reads: 605.79 MB/sec > Timing buffered disk reads: 29.90 MB/sec > > With the cd-rom drive open (average of three runs): > /dev/hda: > Timing cached reads: 594.06 MB/sec > Timing buffered disk reads: 5.11 MB/sec > > With cd-rom drive closed but with no cd in it (average of three runs): > /dev/hda: > Timing cached reads: 593.94 MB/sec > Timing buffered disk reads: 14.7 MB/sec > > My system is a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop (P4M 1.9 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, Geforce > 4 Go 64 MB RAM) and /dev/hda is a Hitachi Travelstar 7k60 (7200 RPM > drive). I also have an external firewire drive that does not exhibit any > of the problems mentioned. > > I'm using a fully updated Fedora Core 3 with a 2.6.10-rc2 kernel and KDE > 3.3.1. I have experienced this problem with earlier kernels though. It > is important to note that the current problem is _always_ reproducible. > > Has anyone experience a similar problem? Should I file a bug report and > if yes, against what component? > > Thanks in advance. > > Regards, > Ismael > > P.S. DMA is enabled. > >
