Re: 2.6.27-rc4-git1: Reported regressions from 2.6.26

Linus Torvalds
2008-08-25T00:51:57Z

On Sun, 24 Aug 2008, David Greaves wrote:
>
> Given that I'll manage at best 1 bisect/day with a reasonable chance of data
> corruption and hardware intermittency screwing it all up I thought it best to
> ask first in case there was another debug approach that could work.

Well, regardless, I think it would be good to fill in the hardware info,
especially wrt CPU data and the exact SATA controller you have.

There's another regression for SATA cold/hot boot issues, and while that
one looks very different, and is probably not really related, it's still a
good idea to try to see if we can match them up. See

Bug-Entry : http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11343
Subject : SATA Cold Boot Problems with 2.6.27-rc[23] on nVidia 680i
Submitter : Manny Maxwell <mannymax-7UBucS1kxs3k1uMJSBkQmQ@public.gmane.org>
Date : 2008-08-14 4:16 (10 days old)
References : http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=121868782917600&w=4

which actually has a patch, and which seems to work fine in 2.6.26 (so not
only is failure pattern different, the point were it starts is different).

But regardless of the big differences, it does seem to point to some
weakness in SATA initialization. But is it limited to _that_ particular
SATA controller, or just a few ones? Or a generic issue? Without more
reports to really find a pattern, I don't think we have a clue, and the
two may be _totally_ unrelated in all ways, but it would be good to at
least report and log the information you have..

Oh, I just noticed that your dmesg _does_ mention sata_sil and sata_via,
so we know which of two drivers it would be, at least. Not the nVidia one.

However, there's been tons of changes in soem core functions: both the
reset handling and the wait-for-ready has changed and caused lots of churn
across most drivers in between 2.6.25 and 2.6.26.

> PS if anyone really is interested then I am happy to try the bisection once I've
> moved her to a new box; otherwise I'm happy to close this.

I think it would be good to try to bisect. It could be something that is
really just limited to that particular machine (maybe it really is some
flaky hardware that just triggers some timing changes), but more likely it
isn't. So the more information, the better. So keep the thing open as long
as somebody is willing to try to gather more info, by all means.

Linus