IOWarrior and the EEEPC

[wayoda]

Hi,
I got my eeepc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC)
a few days ago and now, after playing around a bit with this gadget, I wanted to test how it handles the IOWarrior.

Let's start with the bad news:
The eeepc is shipped with Linux Kernel Version 2.6.21.4.
In this release and the whole 2.6.21.xx series the driver for the IOWarrior is completely broken. It was the first "official" driver release in the mainstream kernel, but the developer who added it to the tree changed the default timeouts for writes to 5 milliseconds instead of 5 seconds.
The error is obvious if you use an IOW24 or IOW40. About every third write-command will fail with a timeout, or worse : it pretends to fail when in reality if it was successful.
With an IOW56 you will not get this error on a system that is running mostly idle. But as soon there is some load on the system, writes for the IOW56 will fail too.

Since I don't think that ASUS is going to update the Kernel for the eeepc to a 2.6.22 version anytime in the near future, the only solution for me was to build a new kernel-module with the working code from the Linux 2.6.22.18 Kernel. It has been a bit tricky to install the toolchain for building a kernel on the eeepc, but that's part of the fun (at least for me).

If someone else is interested in using the IOWarrior with an eeepc you don't have to go through this. Now that I have the binary for the iowarrior-module it only has to be copied to its default location and the machine has to be rebooted once, that's it.

So if you want to try this, send me mail and I'll send you the module and short instructions how to install it.

Eberhard