DMA problem with old Waitec SHUTTLE cdrom

snack · 2013-04-21 13:59:58

On a very old pc I have a Waitec SHUTTLE cdrom device. It works well, except for the fact that on boot it seems to cause some problems related to DMA to udev, which slow down the boot process very much. This is what I have been able to retrieve from the journal:

apr 21 15:43:58 maldiluna kernel: ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0
apr 21 15:43:58 maldiluna kernel: ata1.00: BMDMA stat 0x64
apr 21 15:43:58 maldiluna kernel: ata1.00: failed command: READ DMA
apr 21 15:43:58 maldiluna kernel: [141B blob data]
apr 21 15:43:58 maldiluna kernel: ata1.00: status: { DRDY DRQ }
apr 21 15:43:58 maldiluna kernel: ata1: soft resetting link

These lines appear multiple times in the journal, and during boot similar error lines are spawn to the console (I haven't been able to find them in the journal, but if they might be useful I can search again). I have not a precise idea of what is happening, but my feeling is that udev tries to do some DMA read on the device which does not support DMA. In fact, I tried to force DMA for the device from bios, but this makes the boot process hang completely even before loading grub.
Does anybody have an idea about what is happening or about what I can do to fix the problem? Thanks.

R00KIE · 2013-04-21 18:09:51

Try to boot with a data disk in the drive, it may be that udev (or something else) is trying to read from the drive and if there is nothing inside then it returns an error.

snack · 2013-04-22 21:06:27

I booted with the Arch install cd in the drive, disabling booting from cd rom. It does not help at all and the errors are still there. I installed and tried also the LTS kernel, but in this case it's even worse: putting a cd medium in the drive results in a failure when mounting the root filesystem (I think that some timeout is encountered).
Anyway, I think that the culprit may be udev, since the system temporarily hangs at "Triggering uevents..." during boot.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-04-21 13:59:58

DMA problem with old Waitec SHUTTLE cdrom

#2 2013-04-21 18:09:51

Re: DMA problem with old Waitec SHUTTLE cdrom

#3 2013-04-22 21:06:27

Re: DMA problem with old Waitec SHUTTLE cdrom

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