Rick Debay wrote:

> We're moving off of RedHat 8 on ext3 on to Suse 10. On the new system
> we're experiencing poor response in terminal sessions and at the
> keyboard when restoring a database. Our first guess is that it's the
> Reiser file system. Before we start building another test box, I'd like
> to hear anyone's experiences with the Reiser FS or Suse when running
> Firebird.

I'm using both Reiser and ext3 on various instalations in past 3 years.
ReiserFS version 3.6 seems to work quite fine, we haven't had any
problems as long as hardware is functional. In the last year I prefer it
to ext3 as it formats much faster and has faster recovery time in case
of crash/power failure/etc.

The problems you describe could be SuSE specific, or even machine
specific. It sounds like DMA is off for the disk. Assuming that disk is
/dev/hda, you can check it like this:

# grep dma /proc/ide/hda/settings
using_dma 1 0 1 rw

The second and third number should be 0 and 1 (on all non-SATA systems),
while first number should be 1. If it is zero, it means DMA is off. You
can activate it with:

# hdparm -d1 /dev/hda


This will NOT work on SATA disks! If you have SATA disk and controller,
you need to make sure that you're running kernel with SATA support in
it. For some configurations it has to be compiled in the kernel itself,
and not left out as a loadable module, as you can't toggle between SATA
and PATA mode at runtime.

I'm not sure how SuSE does it, but other distros I use have some way to
install SATA kernel. You should check the SuSE docs, or your vendor if
you are paying support.

If you do have SATA kernel, make sure that your PC's motherboard setting
is properly set to SATA only mode, as many kernel drivers don't support
mixed mode, or work poorly with it.

--
Milan Babuskov
http://www.flamerobin.org