Re: Linux 2.4.19-pre3

[Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>]

On Tue, Mar 12 2002, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> So, Jens, could you please explain the problem in the interrupt handlers
> in detail ?

Ok... It affects all the pio handlers in ide-taskfile.c,
multi-write/read as well. The address for pio transfers is calculated
like so:

va = rq->buffer + (rq->nr_sectors - rq->current_nr_sectors) * SECTOR_SIZE;

which is wrong for two reasons. First of all, rq->buffer cannot be
indexed for the entire nr_sectors range -- it's per definition only the
first segment in the request, and can as such only be indexed within the
first current_nr_sectors number of sectors. The above can be grossly out
of range... Second, nr_sectors and current_nr_sectors are indexing two
different things -- the former indexes the entire request (all segments)
while the latter indexes only the first segments. So

	foo = rq->nr_sectors - rq->current_nr_sectors;

makes no sense _at all_ and can only be wrong.

So why does 2.4.19-pre3 work for pio at all? For the same reason that
Andre never found this problem in 2.5 either: the taskfile interrupt
handlers are _never_ used in pio mode. In 2.5 it was by accident, and
when the merge happened they did indeed get used. It ate disks, very
quickly. Take a look at drivers/ide/ide-disk.c, line 64:

#ifdef CONFIG_IDE_TASKFILE_IO
#  undef __TASKFILE__IO /* define __TASKFILE__IO */
#else /* CONFIG_IDE_TASKFILE_IO */
#  undef __TASKFILE__IO
#endif /* CONFIG_IDE_TASKFILE_IO */

It's a mess... This really should have been fixed prior to 2.4
inclusion. Oh well.

-- 
Jens Axboe