[PlanetCCRMA] Hard drive speeds & hdparm

[Mark Knecht]

Fernando,
   That was sort of the conclusion I came to today. I think I'll just
wait a bit for now. I've been messing with software since Saturday
afternoon. I'd like to just cruise for a week or so and make sure this
new machine is stable.

   I'm really pretty impressed with Alsa & Jack. Even using this
on-board Via sound chip I can run at 1.3mS latency and run alsaplayer
through Jack. The only limitation I found was I had to set the number of
buffers to 4 instead of 2 like my RME. However, no xruns at all. 

   Ardour came up pretty much right off the bat. I found on 8.0 that I
didn't have to do that extra ln -s step to build Ardour, so either it's
not required on 8.0, or Paul, et. all have fixed it.

   Anyway, with the addition of this machine I'll now be able to run
Linux/Alsa/Jack + Linux soft synths along side Pro Tools. Very cool!

   Thanks so much for all your help!

Cheers,
Mark


On Mon, 2003-03-17 at 19:52, Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> [Hey list: just back from Germany. The LAD meeting was GREAT... I'll
> post something latter or tomorrow, I'm just trying to catch up with
> emails now]
> 
> >    On a new machine using the Asus A7V333-X motherboard and RH 8.0, I have a
> > newer, faster 80GB EIDE drive. As booted, hdparm -tT /dev/hda reports a
> > speedy 320MB/S for buffered speeds, but only 7.5MB/S unbuffered speeds.
> > Online people talk about approaching 45-50MB/S with this drive under
> > Windows. I'd like to do that.
> > 
> >    Unfortunately, the command from the Planet to speed a drive up
> > 
> > /sbin/hdparm -c 3 -d 1 -m 16 -A1 /dev/hda
> > 
> > isn't doing anything at all. Following that, the drive continues at 7.5MB/S.
> > 
> >    During boot there is a message that this MB has an unrecognized chipset,
> > which is a newer Via chipset that supports a 333MHz front side bus. dmesg
> > also gives an email address to report it, so I did, but this MB has been
> > around since last year, so I think this is a RH 8.0 issue, and probably not
> > a raw Linux issue.
> 
> This is a kernel issue. The kernel is not new enough (if it is
> 2.4.19-1.ll that is understandable) and does not know (probably) how to
> enable dma for that particular chipset. You could try to manually
> install the trial 2.4.20 kernel that has not yet made it to the
> repository, it most probably will fix the problem. I'll see if I can put
> all that stuff online soon. 
> 
> -- Fernando
> 
> This is what I sent to the list a while ago:
> 
> 
> You may want to test drive a planetary 2.4.20-pre4 kernel just for the
> fun of it :-) You will find the rpms in:
> 
> http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/redhat/linux/planetdev/8.0/en/os/i686/
> and
> http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/mirror/redhat/linux/planetdev/8.0/en/os/i386/
> 
> You will have to download and install them manually as they are not part
> of the repository. You don't need all the rpms that are there. Get only:
> from the i686 directory:
>   kernel-up-2.4.20-1.12.ll.acpi.i686.rpm
>   alsa-driver-2.4.20-1.12.ll.acpi-0.9.0-45.i686.rpm
> 
> from the i386 directory:
>   kernel-source-2.4.20-1.12.ll.acpi.i386.rpm
> (needed only if you want to compile new kernel drivers - but this kernel
> has been compiled with gcc 3.2 so you are out of luck in 7.3 :-)
> 
> To install the kernel:
>   (do **NOT** use rpm -Uvh as that will erase previous kernels!
>    you have been warned!!)
>   rpm -ivh kernel-up-2.4.20-1.12.ll.acpi.i686.rpm
> To install the alsa driver:
>   rpm -Uvh alsa-driver-2.4.20-1.12.ll.acpi-0.9.0-45.i686.rpm
> To install the kernel sources (optional at this point):
>   rpm -ivh kernel-source-2.4.20-1.12.ll.acpi.i386.rpm
> 
> 
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