Instability/disk chugging with Thinkpad R50p

From: Marty (net_at_comcast.martyamodeo)
Date: 12/15/04

  • Next message: larwe_at_larwe.com: "Re: Instability/disk chugging with Thinkpad R50p" 
    Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 22:41:32 -0800

    Hi folks.

    I've got a Thinkpad R50p with Redhat 8 on it. For some reason, it seems
    that any heavy disk activity makes the system tank in a big way (only
    responds to power off). I can lock up my system simply by gunzip'ing a
    200MB file. Any unsustained but heavy disk activity causes noticable
    wheezing of the rest of the system (mouse cursor jumping, excrutiatingly
    slow redraws, etc.). The system load also spikes to 100%, as expected.

    In trying to fix the problem, I've disabled the parallel and serial
    ports, and turned off all devices that I had no intention of using in
    the BIOS. I also made sure there was no IRQ sharing being forced by the
    PnP BIOS. None of that made any discernable difference.

    Today I just discovered and tried playing around with hdparm. When I
    disabled the interrupt masking, my system no longer locks when unzipping
    a big file, but it still wheezes heavily (to the point of unusability).
      I tried telling it to enable DMA transfers, but it tells me that it can't.

    Any ideas where to look or what to tweak? I used to be a Linux user a
    long time ago, and was quite familiar with ancient versions of
    Slackware, but all of the configuration stuff is unfamiliar to me now.
    Heck... I don't even know how to convince grub to use a new kernel.

    All help is appreciated. 

    -- 
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