Re: Laptop mode causing writes to wrong sectors?

[Bradley Chapman <kakadu@gmail.com>]

Mr. Samwel,

On 11/17/05, Bart Samwel <bart@samwel.tk> wrote:
> Bradley Chapman wrote:
> > Mr. Samwel,
> >
> > On 11/17/05, Bart Samwel <bart@samwel.tk> wrote:
> >> OK, that's the second report then. I'm beginning to worry. :/
> >>
> >> Are you seeing any DMA timeout messages in your kernel log?
> >
> > Once, when my /var partition got trashed - about thirty or forty loud
> > and scary messages from the IDE core saying that various disk accesses
> > (i.e. normal read/writes) were failing. I do believe DMA was
> > mentioned.
>
> This could be the problem I was talking about. Was this happening during
> spindown or not?

I believe so. I only noticed it when I checked my dmesg after the
ipw2200 driver crapped out yet again...

>
> > Another time (i.e. just now), I got five Oopses in a row, most of them
> > in kmem_cache_alloc() but with one in generic_aio_file_read().
> > Unfortunately I am using fglrx right now so they are probably quite
> > meaningless...*
>
> I guess so. They all oops on reading the same address (0x05c2a5bb),
> there's something corrupted in the slab cache, cause unknown. Very
> possibly fglrx.

Indeed. I expected as such.

>
> > Most of the time though, I don't see anything.
>
> ...while still experiencing corruption?
>
> >> Bradley, Jan, since when have these problems been happening? Kernel
> >> version-wise, I mean?
> >
> > They started with 2.6.13. I can't remember ever expereincing random
> > partition trashing or random file corruption in 2.6.12. I tried
> > 2.6.14.1 - that kernel did Bad Things as well.
> >
> > So far though, as long as I stay on juice, 2.6.13 seems to behave.
>
> Hmmmm. This means that you could still be experiencing the same thing
> that Andrea Gelmini was reporting. Could you try the things he said made
> it worse, and check if things go wrong? You are, of course, allowed to
> decline because of the risk involved. :-) The things are:
>
> Big activity:
>
> * iozone -A
> * unrar big file
> * In order to make it happen faster:
>         cd /proc/sys/vm
>         echo 100 > dirty_background_ratio
>         echo 1000000 > dirty_expire_centisecs
>         echo 100 > dirty_ratio
>         echo 1000000 > dirty_writeback_centisecs

No thanks. I'll stick to 'normal usage' triggers and see if I can
gather any data that way ;-)))

>
> --Bart
>

Brad
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