Re: [PATCH] scsi_lib.c: continue after MEDIUM_ERROR

[Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>]

On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 05:58:04PM -0500, Mark Lord wrote:
> Matt Mackall wrote:
> >..
> >Also worth considering is that spending minutes trying to reread
> >damaged sectors is likely to accelerate your death spiral. More data
> >may be recoverable if you give up quickly in a first pass, then go
> >back and manually retry damaged bits with smaller I/Os.
> 
> All good input.  But what was being debated here is not so much
> the retrying of known-bad sectors, but rather what to do about
> the kiBs or MiBs of sectors remaining in a merged request after
> hitting a single bad sector mid-way.

Yep, that's precisely what was addressed in the part you snipped. 

My main point being that what to do about the remaining workload
should be dependent on the size of the I/O. If we encounter errors on
sectors 4,5,6,7,8.. of a 1MB request, we should have a threshold for
giving up. It's not unreasonable for that threshold to be larger than
1, but it should not be 2048.

And if we do the I/O as four 256KB requests, we should have
approximately the same number of retries (assuming the whole region's
bad).

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.