Linux DMA problem.

From: Shaun Brennan (shauncbrennan_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 05/28/04 

Date: 28 May 2004 13:44:50 -0700

I have a Ampro Little Board 700 that I am running with a SanDisk 1.0Gb
compact flash card to boot off of. I am booting it thru the ide,
rather than a usb boot. My problem is, the new SanDisk's support DMA,
which is causing the bootup to take forever as Linux times out with
errors, though it still boots. I am using Gentoo with a
2.4.22-gentoo-r5 kernel.

  I don't have the best understanding of how Linux boots, but I
thought that after Grub a ram disk was loaded into memory which sets
up a few things before the actual kernel is loaded. The problem I see
is before any of the startup scripts are run, during what I think is
the ram disk phase. I get timeouts with "dma_timer_expiry" and "dma
status = 0x21". This happens three times or so, then the boot
continues.

  I've tried "hdparm -d 0 -k 1 /dev/hda" but that doesn't work, and
any changes I make in startup scripts happen after the timeouts have
occured. I've also tried disabling dma in the bios (Phoenix 6.00) but
to no effect. I've tried a "nodma" line in grub.conf and I still have
nothing.

  Hopefully, that's enough info to get you started, any help would be
most appreciated.

Shaun Brennan

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