Arch Linux

Z.V

Member

Registered: 2008-06-27

Posts: 6

Help Installing Arch onto CF Card

Hello Everyone,

Been very happy with arch, thanks for such a great system. I have bought a new laptop after my Thinkpad died and one thing I decided to do is replace the 20GB hard disk with two high-speed CF Cards attached to a IDE adapter.

The first problem I had is that the arch install CD would not boot, it would give me some "ata1.00 exception Emask0x0 frozen" error message and the whole machine would lock up, requiring a hard reset.

I found out that adding "irqpoll" to the boot commands sorted that problem out and I could boot into the live CD. Now the problem was the transfer rates. hdparm -t gives me under a megabyte transfer rate. Unfortunately I can't enable DMA on the devices, because hdparm cannot work on SCSI devices. It gives me lots of errors if I try. Other distros (I've tried debian/knoppix) detects the disks correctly (giving me excess of 30mb/s on the cards) , although they come up with IDE devices (hda and hdb).

Is it possible to force Arch to not see the drives as SCSI disks? If not can anyone give some tips on how to enable DMA and have it work (both cards and the adapter support UDMA).

Thanks!

Z.V

loserone

Member

Registered: 2007-10-17

Posts: 12

Re: Help Installing Arch onto CF Card

Do you get the following in your dmesg?

ata1.00: CFA: LEXAR ATA FLASH CARD, 20071016, max UDMA/100
ata1.00: limited to UDMA/33 due to 40-wire cable
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/33

or something similar?
The issue is with libata - for me at least.  Any system where this does work at full speed uses the older way of finding the devices.

there's a patch for 2.6.23 on the LKML, but I haven't yet managed to apply that patch successfully on any newer kernels.  If I manage to, I'll make sure I create a PKGBUILD for applying it.

If it's not this issue, I apologise.

Is it the Addonics CF adapter you're using btw?

Z.V

Member

Registered: 2008-06-27

Posts: 6

Re: Help Installing Arch onto CF Card

Hello,

Sorry but thats not the issue. I took a picture of the error message:

Thats it. After the last "ata1: soft resetting link" it hangs and I need to do a cold reboot.

The two CF cards I am using are a Sandisk 8mb extreme III CF card for the root partition and a 16GB Generic card for the home directory (which ironically, is twice as fast as the sandisk despite being cheaper).

Thanks!

gradgrind

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2005-10-06

Posts: 921

Re: Help Installing Arch onto CF Card

I only know of one way to get the kernel to use ide drivers instead of pata (that doesn't mean it is the only way!) and that is to rebuild the initramfs (using mkinitcpio) - you change 'pata' to 'ide' in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf. That would mean rerunning mkinitcpio after the installation. If you try this remember you will possibly need to change /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst (probably not if you are using disk labels or uuid).

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larch: http://larch.berlios.de

lilsirecho

Veteran

Registered: 2003-10-24

Posts: 5,000

Re: Help Installing Arch onto CF Card

While using Faunos with Gradgrinds mkinitcpio changes I have successfully booted with addonics Sata/Cf adapter.  This CF is Adata 266x and the hdparm read speeds are 46MB/sec.  This is in an intel machine with 4 Sata ports ich7 ..

I also have a raid0 setup in Faunos using three addonics/CF adapters which has a read speed of 125MB/sec. This acts as a local cachedir for large packages installable with pacman -U as needed (bookmarked install scripts).

The Sata/Cf arrangement recognizes the devices as sd() and hdparm returns 46MB/sec.

Within archlinux with an hdd/CF adapter using mkinitcpio change I can run Faunos from the same CF card.

It is necessary to change mkinitcpio to obtain the DMA for the HDD versions but Sata/CF it seems does not require such treatment.

I am hoping that CFAST cards with adapters will produce the 300MB/s advertised with a Sata application.  My raid0 with two of them would reach 600MB/sec, a very healthy rate.  This is conjecture for the future which may never arrive.

Best of luck to you with the CF cards.  Adata does well with the 266x turbo but San Disk extremeIII is a 30MB/s device.

My system is probably six to eight months in operation.  All CF cards are primarily operating in r/o mode, the CF cards are 8MB Adata 266x turbos.

Some adapters for pci/hdd are good applied to the problem since they convert to HDD and are compatible with CF/HDD adapters (Syba adapters in my machine).  This allows a given libata machine to be utilized for the CF application using DMA from the pci card.  This requires two adapters but is effective.

Hope this is helpful...................

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loserone

Member

Registered: 2007-10-17

Posts: 12

Re: Help Installing Arch onto CF Card

Seeing as both problems would appear to be resolved by this suggestion, could either of you elaborate on this a little? I'm aware that you both seem to have a lot of experience in this matter!

I've tried to swap pata for ide in my mkinicpio.conf, and then run mkinitcpio -g /boot/kernel32.img, before rebooting - the issue remains.  Through trial and error, it seems my addonics ide=>CF +lexar combination is using the scsi hook (ie, I can remove auto - is this possible, or have I simply missed something out here? My Addonics adapter is IDE => CF, not SATA.

If i set my MODULES= line to "piix ide-disk" and keep PATA out of HOOKS, I can use IDE fine (once I've changed my menu.lst and fstab for hda not sda) - but now it's giving me the following:

piix 0000:00:1f.1: IDE controller (0x8086:0x24ca rev 0x01)
PIIX_IDE 0000:00:1f.1: enabling device (0005 -> 0007)
PIIX_IDE 0000:00:1f.1: PCI INT A -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
piix 0000:00:1f.1: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0x1810-0x1817
    ide1: BM-DMA at 0x1818-0x181f
Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: LEXAR ATA FLASH CARD, CFA DISK drive
hda: host max PIO4 wanted PIO255(auto-tune) selected PIO2
hda: host side 80-wire cable detection failed, limiting max speed to UDMA33
hda: UDMA/33 mode selected

I've got  "ide0=ata66 ide1=ata66" on my kernel line in menu.lst, but get the same with out them.

Could someone provide example MODULES= and HOOKS= lines using such a setup? I've proven the adapter and the card are UDMA5 capable, I just can't use it, and I'm going round in circles now..

Hope I'm not hijacking your thread too much Z.V..

Z.V

Member

Registered: 2008-06-27

Posts: 6

Re: Help Installing Arch onto CF Card

Hope I'm not hijacking your thread too much Z.V..

It's ok. I have some good news. It seems the latest release of Arch doesn't have this problem. I got rid of the 8GB sandisk and bought another generic 16GB CF. Now both of them give me about 30MB/s transfer rate, which is good.

I wanted to make these two CF cards function like a 32GB one. But I'm not sure, is it better to raid0 them or do a linear raid? At the moment I have it set as raid0 and while that gives me a very good transfer rate (in the region of 50MB/s read) I find that the machine locks up every few mins when a program starts writing to the cards. I have set the IO scheduler to "noop" and that has improved the situation, but I still get the lockups. Becuase of this I really can't run more than one program at a time, which isn't very good.

I know that flash has slower writing time, but I didn't think it would be this bad. Does anyone have any tips/ideas for improving the performance? Was raid0 a bad idea for this?

Thanks!