Re: sata_nv failure on 2.4.18 (Fedora Core 6)

[Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>]

Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
>> Does the problem occur on 2.6.18 but not on earlier version?  If it
>> doesn't happen on 2.6.17, we can rule out h/w problem.
> 
> Difficult to say... this is a fresh install of FC6 and it's a production
> box (heh, it handles my email !) so we can't easily test plenty
> different kernels on it unfortunately... If 2.6.17 can be booted and
> works fine on FC6, might be worth giving it a go but I wouldnt' expect
> too many tests of that sort.
> 
>> * If 2.6.17 shows the same problem : could be a faulty drive or
>>   problem in the controller.  NV SATA controllers supply two
>>   interfaces - legacy TF/BMDMA and ADMA.  The former tends to react
>>   badly when error condition occurs.  Driver for ADMA interface is
>>   under development.  It could be that the controller cannot cope with
>>   transient transmission errors.  If this is the case, ADMA driver
>>   should be able to fix it.
> 
> Do we have any contact at nVidia that could rule on that issue ? The
> drives both appear to work fine on the SIL controller... 

Robert Hancock is working on nv adma suppport.

   http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ide/13608

W/ the above patch, sata_nv should be able to recover much better from 
error conditions, but we still have to find out why such errors are 
occurring in the first place.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun