Hi! I've subscribed to this list temporarily to search for a help with my problems with burning audio CDs on a recent kernels. Before writing here, I tried to find a solution on the Net, but just a few people reported similar problems, they were not identical to mine, and no solution was even given to any of them. So I decided to try the luck here. Please excuse me if my search was not perfect and I missed it somewhere. The problem is that on 2.6.10 and 2.6.11-rc[1-3], burning audio CDs consumes so much CPU cycles, that my dual Athlon 1800+ system cannot serve the process and cd burner dies of repeated buffer underruns or totally crashes, requiring physical reset to revive (no ide bus reset is enough). The only workaround for this is to force a slow speed - 12x for burning, which is the maximum the CPUs can handle. Otherwise, cdrecord shows that FIFO buffer starts at about 100% and after burning about 20 - 30 MB of data, it starts to get empty, about another 10 MBs it's at 0%, device buffer is then emptied and the process fails. Enabling burnfree sometimes helps, but is not reliable as well. Burning at 12x speed makes CPU load about 1.5. Using 16x speed goes above 2.0, which means that my 2 not-so-slow CPUs cannot serve this at real time. All this with cdrecord run by root from text console. Using graphical frontend like k3b is of course even worse, because it requires its own CPU cycles. The last kernel which worked perfectly was 2.6.7. On 2.6.8, there was the mem exhausting problem present, so I didn't use it at all, as well as I skipped 2.6.9. I think that it's more than simply not using DMA (which mentioned one of people reporting a similar problem) because normally, even with DMA off, the CPU should handle the necessary throughput required for at least 24x speed. Burning data CDs and using packet mode writing works reliably and at a full speed with minimum CPU load. Is this problem known generally, or is it a very special condition (specific chipset/CDROM drive combination etc.) that it's not observed generally ? I can't believe that it's not fixed yet... The following are excerpts from dmesg output as well as some info about the driver. I will be happy for any kind of reply! With regards, Pavel Troller
Linux version 2.6.11-rc3 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) (gcc version 3.3.3 (propolice)) #2 SMP Thu Feb 3 07:08:20 CET 2005 ... Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2 ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx AMD7441: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:07.1 AMD7441: chipset revision 4 AMD7441: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later AMD7441: 0000:00:07.1 (rev 04) UDMA100 controller ide0: BM-DMA at 0xd000-0xd007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio ide1: BM-DMA at 0xd008-0xd00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio Probing IDE interface ide0... hda: ST3120026A, ATA DISK drive ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 Probing IDE interface ide1... hdc: SONY CD-RW CRX300E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 Probing IDE interface ide2... Probing IDE interface ide3... Probing IDE interface ide4... Probing IDE interface ide5... hda: max request size: 1024KiB hda: 234441648 sectors (120034 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63, UDMA(100) hda: cache flushes supported /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p3 p4 < p5 p6 p7 > hdc: ATAPI 12X DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33) Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20 ... [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# cat /proc/ide/hdc/settings Warning: /proc/ide/hd?/settings interface is obsolete, and will be removed soon! name value min max mode ---- ----- --- --- ---- current_speed 66 0 70 rw dsc_overlap 0 0 1 rw init_speed 12 0 70 rw io_32bit 1 0 3 rw keepsettings 0 0 1 rw nice1 1 0 1 rw number 2 0 3 rw pio_mode write-only 0 255 w unmaskirq 1 0 1 rw using_dma 1 0 1 rw - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html