Driver support for OCIDEC ATA core?

Thanks for your advice!

I'm not in front of the system at the moment, so this is from memory...

I've tried hdparm, but either it didn't allow me to change modes, or the mode didn't seem to affect anything (I think it didn't allow a change). I used your earlier suggestions to tweak the timing of the ALT-CF interface to match PIO mode 4, so I'm not sure how much changing the PIO mode would change. I'd like to try mulit or DMA modes, but it appears that the driver doesn't support it, and as you point out, it's hard to get to where I want to be without UDMA mode.

Would using the Avalon DMA core to perform the PIO transfers improve the transfer rate to the hard drive, or just lower the cpu load on the Nios? I guess the DMA engine would have lower latency in responding... You don't by chance have a reference to anyone that's done that, do you?

Finally, as far as mmap goes, I'll definitely do that in my application but at the moment I'm just testing with dd. (dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test_file bs=1024 count=100000) I guess I was assuming that would be about as efficient as I could get for test purposes; any other sugestions?