Upgrade to 2.6.19 kernel issues
I have been quite busy lately, trying to find a new apartment in Tel Aviv (not an easy task), and under allot of work. I've decided to take advantage of the rainy weekend to do some maintainence on my laptop, including a kernel upgrade from 2.6.18 to 2.6.19 (Gentoo ck-sources).
It seems that 2.6.19 introduced some major changes in ATA/SATA drives. For some reason, my SATA drive is no longer /dev/sda as it always was, but is now /dev/hda (which kind of makes sense, as it is not a SCSI device...). This in turn caused quite a headache - it has been long since I had to work hard for a kernel upgrade.
Getting the machine to boot was not easy - I had to change my GRUB configuration to point to the "new" root device (changed root=/dev/sda5 to root=/dev/hda5). After getting the kernel to not panic, init didn't finish and this is where I had to edit my /etc/fstab and replace all instances of /dev/sda with /dev/hda.
After another reboot, the machine is now up - but it seems to be very slow and DMA is off. I can't turn it on using hdparam - I get a permission denied error.
I guess it's time for some Googling, and going over the kernel config again to see if there is something I missed.
[update]: It seems that all I had to do is enable my SATA chipset driver in the kernel cofig. Now I have /dev/sda back again and speed is back to normal.
This is what I had to enable (make menuconfig):
-
Device Drivers -> Serial ATA -> Intel PIIX/ICH SATA support
(of course, replace the Intel drivers with your own - look at lspci output if you're not sure what to use)
Thanks very much it helped me as well. Weblogs are amazing!
Having similar troubles on my PIIX. I already have the kernel support you list here, but still I got panics, until I added 'earlymodules=piix' to the kernel boot parameters. That put back the old lettering. Unfortunately, I still can't get dma going on my single atapi dvd drive.
Could you tell me, do you still have the old pata piix driver in your config? Thanks...
Hi Hunter,
I searched for PIIX stuff, and this is what I have:
PATA_MPIIX (Intel PATA MPIIX support) => Disabled
APA_PIIX (Intel PIIX/ICH SATA support) => Enabled
PATA_OLDPIIX (Intel PATA old PIIX support) => Disabled
BLK_DEV_PIIX (Intel PIIXn chipset support) => Enabled
Note that I compiled these in statically, not as modules.