Trying to DMA data from PCI bus to IDE

I'm trying to use a PC104 IO board that utilizes the PLX PCI9080 chip to handle DMA transfers across the PCI bus to the rest of the PC104 stack. I've been able to take the data from the IO board, DMA it to memory, and then use the regular Linux functions to write it to the hard drive. Even though my drive is using the highest UDMA settings (ATA66 for a solid state drive) and have tweaked the hdparm, it seems as if there's too much Linux file overhead involved to get it any faster -- especially because I'm trying to "stream" lots of data really fast for an extended time period to anywhere on the drive (I'll deal with the partitions and FAT later). It seems as if Linux "waits" for about 5sec before it starts to write ANYTHING to the drive. Even if I turn off all of the caching settings in hdparm. This tells me that it's a caching technique specific to the kernel that *hopefully* I can turn off.

So, Does anyone know of/have ideas about a way to configure the PCI9080 chip or similar chip to DMA that data to a single address in memory? I've set up the drive to receive data via DMA data and write it to specific sectors so then the PCI9080 would need to be "pointed to" a single location in memory (0x1f0 to be exact for the primary IDE). I've been trying everything, but I think there might be something having to do with how Linux maps the addresses in virtual memory vs. physical for the PCI9080.

Effectively, it should be set up to pull the data from the PCI source (a FIFO address on the IO board) and perform a DMA transfer to memory while NOT incrementing the destination address.

Any help is GREATLY appreciated. Thanks.

After I tweaked the values in /proc/sys/vm (bdflush in particular)it looks like I can't achieve the transfers to occur as I need them. There's still too much file overhead. I can watch as the program sends multiple buffers to the disk to be written and then it pauses for a moment. I'm essentially looking to have the buffer in memory be set up for the UDMA transfer and then I leave to grab the next chunk of data while the drive in busy.

Even when I set up a raw device write (seperate partition, no formatting, on hda2) it still has trouble bypassing the caching system

-- bdflush's parameteres still govern the transfers. Do you know of a way to make a system/kernel call that can just perform the direct transfer? I haven't searched the many levels of writing to a file, but I'm sure that somewhere far down the abstraction there's a place where a buffer in memory is called to be written to disk.

Yeah, I considered that as the most viable FAT update method (just using FAT32 so that it's easy to serve up in SAMBA and not complicated to control). I'd still have to go back to the file entry and adjust the size accordingly, though.

If all this doesn't work, I'll have to try to control the UDMA transfer myself. Can this be accomplished using the IDE Bus Mastering standard? I think this feature is part of PCI 2.2 and intrinsic to the SiS630ST chipset that I'm using. If so, is this the way to go about performing a UDMA transfer?

Thanks again, Greg