Jerky I/O scheduling

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 06:56:18PM +0300, Ville Vainio wrote:

> I've been wondering whether there is something "wrong" with i/o
> scheduling of Ubuntu. I have a SiI 3112 sata controller with Seagata
> Barracudda drive (abit KD7S motherboard, which is a Via Kt400 board.
> Athlon Xp 2400+, 512Mb ram), and when copying large amounts of data
> (to/from other disk, from network to the disk) the computer starts to
> feel jerky. I'm using Nautilus to do the copying. This shouldn't happen
> w/ 2.6 series kernels, and I don't recall experience like this w/ other
> distros. Music stutters a lot (becomes unlistenable), mouse moves
> erratically, etc. "top" doesn't display any process as eating up all the
> performance - xfree86 is typically eating up most of the performance,
> and it's typically only something like 30-40%.
> 
> I wonder if anyone else has been having similar problems, and whether
> there is something I could do about it.

It sounds like DMA is not enabled on your hard drive; some web searches will
find you more information on this subject.

-- 
 - mdz