Re: SATA exceptions with 2.6.20-rc5

[Alistair John Strachan <s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk>]

On Saturday 20 January 2007 19:59, Robert Hancock wrote:
> Ian Kumlien wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I went from 2.6.19+sata_nv-adma-ncq-v7.patch, with no problems and adama
> > enabled, to 2.6.20-rc5, which gave me problems almost instantly.
> >
> > I just thought that it might be interesting to know that it DID work
> > nicely.
> >
> > CC since i'm not on the ml
>
> (I'm ccing more of the people who reported this)
>
> Well that's interesting.. The only significant change that went into
> 2.6.20-rc5 in that driver that wasn't in that version you mentioned was
> this one:
>
> http://www2.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=com
>mit;h=2dec7555e6bf2772749113ea0ad454fcdb8cf861
>
> Could you (or anyone else) test what happens if you take the 2.6.20-rc5
> version of sata_nv.c and try it on 2.6.19? That would tell us whether
> it's this change or whether it's something else (i.e. in libata core).

I'm still running an -rc5 kernel with ADMA switched off entirely and I can't 
reproduce the problem. How is everybody else reproducing this?

I've been successful installing bonnie++, then going to a large XFS partition 
and running "bonnie++ -u 1000:1000" and letting it run through, all defaults.

It doesn't cause the problem I was seeing in -rc5 with ADMA on, when I switch 
ADMA off, so I think this is sufficient to fix it.

Others have reported differently. Did you guys do:

alistair@damocles:~$ cat /proc/cmdline
root=/dev/sda1 ro sata_nv.adma=0

Or something similar? This is how Jeff suggested disabling ADMA and indeed the 
messages about its use disappear from dmesg.

-- 
Cheers,
Alistair.

Final year Computer Science undergraduate.
1F2 55 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, UK.