DMA issues

[John Stilian]

On Sat, 2004-10-16 at 17:19 -0500, Jason Bradley Nance wrote:
> 
> I don't think that DMA is enabled because when I play DVDs the system
> is 
> sluggish even though the load average is practically 0.  This box is
> a 
> P4 3.2 GHz HT box with 1 GiB of DDR2 RAM and a PCX nVidia 5900, so it 
> should be able to play DVDs without any problem.
> 
> Any insight on this would be much appreciated.
> 

You won't be able to enable DMA on your PATA drives if you both a) have
at least one SATA drive and b) load ide-generic before loading your
chipset driver. The solution (for you, others will need to choose the
appropriate chipset driver) is to put piix in /etc/modules somewhere
before ide-generic. Yeah, it's pretty wacky; I ended up building my own
kernels for months with Debian because I didn't know this.

If you unload ide-generic, ide-cd, and piix and then re-load them
(ide-generic last), it might work without rebooting.