Summary of kt333a woes, with happy ALi ending

["Joseph N. Hall" <joseph@5sigma.com>]

Also FYI: the Soyo Dragon Ultra Platinum m/b never did give me proper
DMA performance on my ATAPI devices.  I tried:

  stock RH 7.3 kernel
  2.4.19
  2.4.20-pre5-ac1

The stock kernel might not have had proper DMA support at all; I 
upgraded to 2.4.19 quickly for other reasons.  The most obvious problem
with 2.4.19 and 2.4.20-pre5-ac1 was that my IDE DVD-R/RAM/ROM device
did not do DMA, ever, and when forced to attempt DMA the machine eventually
locked, with no error messages that I ever saw.  It works fine with
my new Iwill m/b:

[joseph@dhcppc5 ticket]# hdparm -I /dev/hdd

/dev/hdd:

ATAPI CD-ROM, with removable media
        Model Number:           MATSHITADVD-RAM LF-D310
        Serial Number:
        Firmware Revision:      A123
Standards:
Configuration:
        DRQ response: 50us.
        Packet size: 12 bytes
Capabilities:
        LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
        DMA: sdma0 sdma1 sdma2 mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2
             Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
        PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
             Cycle time: no flow control=180ns  IORDY flow control=120ns

Nor did other ATAPI devices do DMA--I tried a generic CDROM and
an ASUS CDR/RW/ROM.  I saw the same behavior when the ATAPI devices
were plugged into the Highpoint controller.

Also HD access seemed slow at times, and there would occasionally be
mysteriously long pauses of a few sec during kernel compiles etc. where
it seemed that some sort of I/O blocking was going on.

I observed similar behavior in Win2k but ... I don't know that I ever
got a proper set of drivers installed.  All I know is that with the
IWill m/b (ALi chipset) everything is working OK.  I did not get 
proper DVD playback on Win2k--it seemed exactly the same slowness
as with Linux.

OTOH my DVDs play fine off the drive from mplayer now, and I can read
and write at appropriate speeds.

I would like to get the kt333a m/b working eventually, because I don't
think my IWill m/b will support the new core Athlons.  I suspect that
the board "works" but there must be a BIOS or chipset issue that isn't
resolved.

  -joseph