From owner-freebsd-stable  Mon Jul 19 13:25:41 1999
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Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1999 13:24:18 -0700
From: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>
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To: tarkhil@asteroid.svib.ru
Cc: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG,
	stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Soft-updates feedback
References: <199907030501.JAA31071@shuttle.svib.ru>
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Alex Povolotsky wrote:
> 
> About a week ago, I've posted a message here and didn't got positive replies.
> 
> The problem is:
> 
> when I use soft-updates on IDE disks (disk on primary master, disk on
> secondary master, CD on primary slave), any active disk-using program
> (starting Netscape, starting EXMH) causes all other programs literally to stop
> for several seconds (well, 20-30 seconds is quite often!). Turning
> soft-updates off causes this nastiness to disappear, but also slows down
> disk-active processess.
> 
> Alex.
> 
> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
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I saw this behaviour before..
It was with an IDE disk drive running in PIO mode

turning on DMA mode for the disk fixed it.
I have  no idea as to what was goin wrong, however I 
suggest that you try a kernel from -current as there has been a lot of
change in the areas that might cause this sort of thing.


julian


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