Bugzilla – Bug 71879
no DMA mode set for SATA drive
Last modified: 2008-01-31 14:24:09 UTC
On an x86-64 system with SATA drive (at least on mine) clicking on the "IDE DMA Modus" displays the HD. No DMA mode is set. I don't know if it is necessary for SATA drives to set DMA, but either it should be set automatically or the disk shouldn't appear in the list of drives.
Assigning to the yast2-tune maintainer
The DMA mode is enabled by default, yast just doesn't know which mode is current (133MB/s or 100MB/s or ...). I reproduced it on a testmachine. The problem is that hdparm -i doesn't print DMA mode line, but hdparm -I does. Yast unfortunately uses -i. I'll change it to -I parameter instead.
Another problem is that 'hdparm -d <disk>' doesn't work correctly with SATA drives (at least it happens on a test machine).
'hdparm -d <disk>' works corectly with PATA drives, with SATA drives it returns error "HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device". 'hdparm -I <disk>' works correctly with both drive types. So the question is whether it's possible to get (and set) DMA status for SATA drives at all. It may be problem of the test machine to which I have access or it may be a general SATA problem. Rudi?
AFAIR dma-control of SATA drives is not supported in hdparm (meaning in the kernel ioctls used by hdparm). Jens or Vojtech might be able to tell details.
I just have asked Vojtech: SATA always use DMA, it's similar to SCSI. So SATA disks shoud not be displayed in the table. I'll fix that.
fixed in yast2-tune-2.11.6
Making the bug public to explain why the YaST IDE DMA module was dropped.