Baslinux mailing list

[David Moberg <davidjmoberg AT gmail.com>]

sindi keesan wrote:
>
> > It may make more sense to rebuild busybox with the hdparm applet.
> > You can skip the DMA feature - BL has DMA off by default and it is
> > only useful if your hardware supports DMA and you need a faster
> > disk transfer.
>
> Two of our computers seem to have DMA problems and BL (2) tries to do
> something and finally disables DMA, so I had to disable in CMOS.
> Someone said it keeps the cpu from overheating.  The cpu in one of these
> was indeed gettinbg fried.  We had to put on a better heat sink (flat on
> the bottom to match the cpu, without a heat transfer pad in the middle).

If the CPU burns up because DMA is disabled, it is only a symptom of
a hardware problem, i.e. poor cooling or CPU clocked too high. DMA
only increases the speed of data transfers and reduces CPU usage.

> The loop version has it in /DOS/initrd, the ext2 does not have it
> anywhere.
>
> What does it do in initrd?

Do you mean initrd/DOS? That is your DOS partition. I don't have
hdparm in my initrd or dos partition.

David