Now, for the longest time my laptop has been having these odd hiccups with the harddrive where it would seem to timeout and reset when reading arbitrary sectors, which was causing a huge performance hit. I was worried that I would have to get a new harddrive, a cost I could do without at the moment.
But then when I was reading the description of the driver improvements, it mentioned that earlier versions were having trouble with random bus timeouts, the exact same problem I was having!
So finally today I decided to give it a whirl, and compiled up a brand new 2.6.21.1 kernel. I resisted the temptation to roast some marshmallows over the CPU for the 45 minutes or so that it was churning away, and then finally installed it and rebooted.
And...
No more HD hiccups! Yay! My laptop is useful again!
Edit: actually, it seems the HD is still being stupid, but mostly before the kernel boots which is an interesting change, and pretty much rules out software bugs. Oh well, one of these days I'll just get a new one.
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