Re: [PLUG] Motherboards

[Michael Leone <turgon@mike-leone.com>]

On Mon, 2002-03-25 at 22:55, Doug Crompton wrote:
> 
> How does Linux support new motherboards? When you buy a board it usually
> comes with drivers for ATA, sound, etc. in the windows environment. How
> can I be sure that Linux is utilizing my MB to it's max? Especially the
> IDE.  Are their particular boards to buy? To stay away from?

I just got a new mobo (Asus 77V266-E), and it uses ATA-100 controllers,
as well as non-ATA-100 controllers. There's a mini HOW-TO, that tells
how to make Linux use the faster IDE controller. In a nutshell ... you
have to pass the IO addresses of the ATA-100 controller to the kernel.

In my case  ...

lspci -v
00:06.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc.: Unknown device 0d30 (rev 02)
Subsystem: Promise Technology, Inc.: Unknown device 4d33         
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 9         
I/O ports at d800 [size=8]         
I/O ports at d400 [size=4]         
I/O ports at d000 [size=8]         
I/O ports at b800 [size=4]         
I/O ports at b400 [size=64]         
Memory at eb800000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]         
Expansion ROM at <unassigned> [disabled] [size=64K]         
Capabilities: [58] Power Management version 1

Note the 1st 4 I/O addresses. You pass those parameters to the kernel during install, or as an append: 

ide2=0xd800,0xd402 ide3=0xd000,0xb802

Note that the secondary device on each controller gets an offset of +2.

This makes the ATA-100 controller (in this case) hde, hdef,hdg,hdh.
That's because I also have a "normal" IDE controller, which is hda, hdb,
hdc, hdd.

So now my Win2K is on /dev/hda (on the non-ATA-100 controller, since
it's a non-ATA-100 disk), and my linux is on /dev/hde, since that disk
*is* a ATA-100 drive.

minas-aran:/home/turgon# hdparm -tT /dev/hde
 
/dev/hde:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.46 seconds =278.26 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.90 seconds = 33.68 MB/sec

minas-aran:/home/turgon# hdparm -tT /dev/hda
 
/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.46 seconds =278.26 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  3.00 seconds = 21.33 MB/sec

Gotta love that!

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