Fixed the problem on mah own! [Old message: SCSI is mine greatest enemy. (Performance on a 486)]

[--Damacus-- <damacus@bastion.cnsnet.net>]

Just in case anyone has the IO squelching problems listed as below..

This can easily be fixed using hdparm -u1 /dev/device..  from the hdparm
man page:

       -u     Get/set  interrupt-unmask  flag  for  the drive.  A
              setting of 1 permits the  driver  to  unmask  other
              interrupts  during  processing of a disk interrupt,
              which greatly improves Linux's  responsiveness  and
              eliminates  "serial port overrun" errors.  Use this
              feature with caution: some drive/controller  combi-
              nations do not tolerate the increased I/O latencies
              possible when this feature is enabled, resulting in
              massive   filesystem  corruption.   In  particular,
              CMD-640B and RZ1000 (E)IDE interfaces can be  unre-
              liable (due to a hardware flaw) when this option is
              used with  kernel  versions  earlier  than  2.0.13.
              Disabling  the IDE prefetch feature of these inter-
              faces (usually a BIOS/CMOS setting) provides a safe
              fix for the problem for use with earlier kernels.

Yay!  ... sometimes you find the most helpful things when doing something
barely related to it..  (APM setting optimizations for a laptop led me to find
this :) )

Regards,

Mike

----- Forwarded message from --Damacus-- <damacus@bastion.cnsnet.net> -----

Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 21:47:09 -0500
To: luci-discuss@luci.org
Subject: SCSI is mine greatest enemy.  (Performance on a 486)
X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i

OK, I've got two questions to ask tonight:

Anyhow, I have on it 8.7GB in it-- 5GB SCSI, 3.7 IDE.  This comp has an only
ISA (8MHz) bus, thus an Adaptec ISA SCSI card, and when xferring files from 1
SCSI drive to another, or 1 SCSI drive to another comp (mainly via SMB) , or
even just untarring a file on a SCSI drive things CRAWL.  The modem seems to
just sit there and does nothing.  Many a times, I'll be untarring a 80M file
or so, and from another room I'll hear "Goodbye." followed by many
explenitives as my dad's AOL connection times out.

Q- Is there any way to give SCSI access a lower priority, or give
serial/network a higher priority as to not make them unusable under high IO
loads?

   Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product.
			      -- Ferenc Mantfeld

----- End forwarded message -----

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   Trust the computer industry to shorten "Year 2000" to Y2K.  It was
   this kind of thinking that caused the problem in the first place.

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