SATA drives and DMA

[Juan M.]

Hi,

I'm trying to enable DMA support for a SATA drive (I'm using a common Silicon Image 3112 controller for them). So far when I try to enable DMA:

sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/sda

I get this error:

/dev/sda:
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

I found several forums where people are suggesting recompiling the kernel. On the other hand in the Ubuntu wiki there is an entry against doing this.To make things more confusing, there is a lot of outdated information about DMA SATA support in the kernel in the net.

Do you know any workaround for this without recompiling the kernel ?

Thanks in advance,

- Juan