Ivan Krstic wrote:
He has a generally valid point that slimmer, non-generic kernels are a good idea on production systems.
It's not a bad idea, but waving it around like it will cure cancer is pretty useless.
As for DMA, has anyone tried recompiling a few times and seeing if they can hit the right options? Is there a non-production machine where this experimentation can be done without danger?
Yes, I've tried recompiling 2.6.6 on curly without success so far (that was a week or so ago).
I wrote to Silicon Mechanics to see if they've got any info, and they claim that:
If you upgrade the kernel to at least 2.4.20-28.9 (this is what I tested with) DMA will be enabled by default with the default BIOS controller settings. I highly recommend doing this anyway because there are a number of local root exploits in all but a few of the very latest
kernels.
Unfortunately that doesn't help much since it *doesn't* work on a shiny new 2.6.6 kernel so far as I've been able to determine (either custom compiled or from Red Hat). Of course if the BIOS settings *aren't* the default, how are we to know? I asked them what might need to be changed, I'll ask for more details...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)