Comment 346 for bug 500069

Oops, mid-air collision. I'll answer Andrew's question first.

I'm having two problems.
1. on my Dell D820 I see degraded throughput AND high io wait times as everyone else here has described
2. on my Macbook, I do not see degraded performance, but I see the extremely high io wait times.

Both of these systems have the IDENTICAL IDE chipsets. Read on with my original reply, before collision, for more information.

Quick question, is anyone else using the Intel 82801GBM/GHM IDE chipset, who has this problem as well???

I have a Dell D820 (64 bit) notebook, and a Macbook from late 2007 (the 64 bit ones). I noticed that they both have Intel 82801GBM/GHM IDE chipsets. They both exhibit the problem. If running Gentoo Linux 32 bit on the D820, and one of these bad kernels, my hard drive (which was renamed to hda), gets about 3M/sec, and the high wait times are also present.

With the Macbook, the high io wait times are there, but I get a good throughput, with Gentoo 32 bit. Not sure what the difference is between the D820 and the Macbook, seeing they have very similar hardware (almost identical). I suppose it is possible that Apple made the suggested change that the linux-ata guy suggested (for the bios).

This truly is debilitating. I have now tried two distributions with the latest 2.6.x kernels (Gentoo and OpenSUSE 11.1), and all of them exhibit these symptoms on my hardware. I am almost certain that if this does not get fixed, I will be unable to continue using Linux at work, unless I get a new computer (slim chance but possible). After all, eventually, Gentoo will move towards some new features that require a newer kernel, and I will be left in the dust. I will then be forced to run Linux in vmware under Windows. Please, someone save me from this awful DEATH. muhahahaha.