Re: 2.6.32 seemed to have broken nVidia MCP7A sata controller

[Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 5:48 PM, Mike Cui <cuicui@gmail.com> wrote:
> I finally got a chance to try this on an x58 motherboard. It works
> fine. It looks like the nvidia controller is the problem. Or maybe
> it's just my motherboard.

I'll try and cook up a patch to disable AA on this chipset. Can you
post the output of "lspci -nn" ?

>
> Thanks.
>
> On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 4:37 PM, Mike Cui <cuicui@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Thanks, changing that one line fixed it. I can try to find an intel
>>> motherboard sometime next week to see if it's the drive or the
>>> controller.
>>
>> Hi Mike, did you ever get a chance to try this test?
>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On 12/19/2009 01:29 AM, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On 12/19/2009 01:13 AM, Mike Cui wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I have an nVidia MCP7A AHCI controller. I upgraded to 2.6.32.2 and my
>>>>>> system deterministically freezes trying to mount file systems. Once in
>>>>>> a while it will come back and finish booting after freezing for 1
>>>>>> minute or 2. dmesg indicates that there were NCQ errors, but 2.6.31
>>>>>> anb before has always worked flawlessly for me. What changed in
>>>>>> 2.6.32? I will be more than happy to help track down this issue.
>>>>>
>>>>>> ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
>>>>>> ata1.00: cmd 61/08:00:4f:ad:03/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 out
>>>>>> res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
>>>>>> ata1: hard resetting link
>>>>>> ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
>>>>>> ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
>>>>>> ata1.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0
>>>>>
>>>>> Looks like things are timing out, and then go downhill from there. This
>>>>> explanation of timeout gives some hints on possible causes:
>>>>> http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Libata_error_messages#Error_classes
>>>>>
>>>>> The ideal would be if you could bisect between 2.6.31 and 2.6.32, to see
>>>>> if it's a software change that is the cause.
>>>>>
>>>>> Looking at drivers/ata/ahci.c history, the only thing that -might- cause
>>>>> problems is 388539f3ff0cf1de926b03f94e1eec112358f74d ('git show $commit'
>>>>> for full commit info and diff).
>>>>
>>>> I suspect that as well (it's the commit that adds FPDMA auto-activate on DMA
>>>> setup FIS support). Your drive indicates it's supported but it's possible
>>>> it's broken on that drive or the controller. If the drive doesn't set the
>>>> activate bit in the DMA setup FIS properly or the controller doesn't respect
>>>> it, then FPDMA requests will stall.
>>>>
>>>> Mike, can you try and revert that patch, or else just change this line in
>>>> drivers/ata/ahci.c:
>>>>
>>>>                pi.flags |= ATA_FLAG_NCQ | ATA_FLAG_FPDMA_AA;
>>>>
>>>> to
>>>>
>>>>                pi.flags |= ATA_FLAG_NCQ;
>>>>
>>>> and rebuild and see if it works better?
>>>>
>>>> I tend to suspect the controller is the problem (I've got WD drives that
>>>> work fine with AA on Intel AHCI, though it could be model-specific). I guess
>>>> the only way to verify for sure which one it is would be if someone else had
>>>> that particular drive model on a different AHCI controller and could verify
>>>> if it worked with 2.6.32+ or not.
>>>>
>>>
>>
>