There's a whole lot more one can do with hdparm. What the kernel _can_ do is enable dma only. hdparm is used to set other performance enhancing options. My '/etc/conf.d/hdparm' contains 'hda_args="-d1A1m16u1a64"' which means:
-d1 - enables dma for this drive (to ensure dma is set).
-A1 - enables the IDE drive's read-lookahead feature.
-m1 - set sector count to 16. This reads 16 sectors per interrupt instead of one. Some drives run slower with this.
-u1 - set interrupt-unmask for the drive. Can be dangerous with some drive/controller combinations. Allows the kernel to service other i/o interrupts, afaicu.
-a64 - set sector count for filesystem read-ahead to 64 sectors. A cache-mechanism.
Nifty! Thanks, Peter. :=D -- () The ASCII Ribbon Campaign - against HTML Email, /\ vCards, and proprietary formats. --------------------------------------------------- Peter A. Gordon (codergeek42) E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG Public Key ID: 0x109DBECE GPG Key Fingerprint (SHA1): E485 E2F7 11CE F9B2 E3D9 C95D 208F B732 109D BECE Encrypted and/or Signed correspondence preffered. GPG Public Key available upon request or from pgp.mit.edu's public key server. ---------------------------------------------------
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
