2004-Dec-18

"lspci | grep IDE" told me I have:

00:01.1 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev d0)

Both systems have SiS 5513. So I built a new 2.6.9 kernel with:

CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SIS5513=y

So a couple days later, on my older system (puget):

/dev/hda:
multcount    = 16 (on)
IO_support   =  0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq    =  0 (off)
using_dma    =  1 (on)
keepsettings =  0 (off)
readonly     =  0 (off)
readahead    = 256 (on)
geometry     = 38792/16/63, sectors = 20020396032, start = 0

The above was without using hdparm. The CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SIS5513=y did that automatically. (But I could tweak it some more.)

reed@puget:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing buffered disk reads:   30 MB in  3.17 seconds =   9.47 MB/sec
reed@puget:~$ sudo hdparm -T /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
Timing cached reads:    96 MB in  2.08 seconds =  46.12 MB/sec

The buffered reads are three times faster. The cached reads are the same.

One machine doesn't have any password prompt after the login prompt, but sshd authentication to it works fine. It does have a /etc/pam.d/login file (but may be set up wrong).

The auth.log shows:

agetty[22209]: tty1: can't exec /bin/login: No such file or directory

On another system the keyboard doesn't work in xdm. The keyboard does work at the console and running startx works and then the keyboard does work fine in X. The problem was:

crw-------    1 heather     family     4,   7 Apr  9  2004 /dev/tty7

I chowned to root:root and restarted xdm and it worked. But later it didn't work. Restarting xdm did work each time though. I still need to figure this out.