I'm testing the latest SystemImager 3.3.2 from the CVS for installation of a rather fast client node.
The installation image is about 1.5 GB in size, but it takes unreasonably long to transfer the disk image using rsync: over 10 minutes, or a mere 2.5 MB/sec effective transfer speed. There's only one server (fast !) and the client node on this 100 Mbit/s Ethernet, so the bottleneck ought to be in the client node. On slower, older client nodes and SI 2.0.2 we're doing at least a factor of 2 faster !
I'm speculating that the SystemImager boel kernel somehow doesn't activate DMA disk access but uses slower PIO in stead, but I don't know how to check the disk access mode during installation.
Can anyone offer suggestions for how to improve the installation speed ? Can we add the "hdparm" utility to the installation and manually set the DMA mode ?
Details on the client node: IBM ThinkCentre S50 PC, 2.8 GHz Pentium-4E CPU, 1 GB RAM, Intel i865 chipset. The disk settings (when up and running Fedora Core 2 Linux) are:
# hdparm -i /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
Model=ST340014A, FwRev=3.10, SerialNo=5JX8GG5Q
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec Fixed DTR>10Mbs RotSpdTol>.5% }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=4
BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=78156288
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:240,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2:* signifies the current active mode
Ole Holm Nielsen Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark
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