On Thursday 16 September 2004 22:12, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 02:47:34PM +0200, Thierry LACOSTE wrote:
> > I'm running netbsd 2.0 on an ACER Aspire 1620 laptop.
> > It works fine accept for some random delays in various
> > commands (ls, etc... or editing with emacs).
> > It seems that the spinning of the disk is stoped and
> > restarted too often, which could explain those delays.
> >
> > Does somebody know how I can check that this is
> > indeed the case ?
> > How can I change the frequency at which
> > the disk is put asleep ?
>
> check atactl(8), especially the setidle and setstandby commands.
> Your bios probably sets the idele and standby timers at boot.

Thanks a lot. The problem seems to disappear with "atactl wd0 setidle 0"
(according to the man page the value 0 disables idle mode;
I will try other values to keep power saving).

I have 3 additional questions :
- How can I see the values attributed to the timers at boot time ?
  I didn't find in the man.
- AFAICS, in my bios menu there is no item concerning the setting
  of these values. Do I have to put the atactl command in rc.local
  or is it possible to have the bios taking care of that ?
- The command "atactl wd0 setstandby 0" (or any value) ends up
  with "ATA command timed out" then the following kernel message:
     pciide0:0:0: lost interrupt
     type : ata tc_bcount: 0 tc_skip: 0
  Where does the problem come from? Can it be related to unsupported DMA?
  The output of dmesg contains the following lines:

pciide0 at pci0 dev 20 function 1
pciide0: ATI Technologies product 0x4349 (rev. 0x00)
pciide0: bus-master DMA support present, but unused (no driver support)
pciide0: primary channel configured to compatibility mode
pciide0: primary channel interrupting at irq 14
atabus0 at pciide0 channel 0
pciide0: secondary channel configured to compatibility mode
pciide0: secondary channel interrupting at irq 15
atabus1 at pciide0 channel 1
  
Regards,
Thierry Lacoste.