Re: Scary Intel SATA errors..

[Mark Lord <liml@rtr.ca>]

Mmmm.. Tejun, here's a clue for what Linus saw on his system:

Right now I'm implementing support for READ/WRITE LONG commands via libata.

And the ata_piix driver gets into a non-recoverable state after successfully
doing a READ LONG command for me, a very similar state to what Linus reported.

But the ahci driver does NOT have this problem.  I haven't tried others.

The thing about R/W LONG, is that they transfer a single PIO sector of data,
PLUS an extra 4 (or more) words at the end.

Funny thing about ATAPI DVD/RW drives, is that they also transfer odd amounts
of data, non-multiples of 512.

I'm betting that the ata_piix hardware has some kind of internal pipeline that
gets confused *sometimes* when a non-512 multiple passes through.  Rarely, though.

I wonder if there's something on that device that we could bit-bang to reset 
it's internal pipelines?

Cheers