Random freezes with libata + ICH7 PATA

Random freezes with libata + ICH7 PATA

[Patrick Nagel]

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Hello,

I tried libata with my ICH7 PATA controller for some (five? seven?) days. 
During those days I experienced four random system freezes. I guess this 
message is not all that helpful - I have no idea what information I should 
have collected so it could be used for debugging. But at least now you know 
there is a problem at all. ;)
After switching back to the old IDE driver, the system runs stable again for 
three days or so, so it's not a sudden coincidental hardware problem.

Some details about my system (a Samsung R65 laptop, custom harddisk):

$ lspci | grep IDE
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller 
(rev 02)

$ dmesg | grep "hd[ab]: "
hda: HTS721010G9AT00, ATA DISK drive
hdb: DV-W28EA, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hda: max request size: 512KiB
hda: 195371568 sectors (100030 MB) w/7539KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63, 
UDMA(100)
hda: cache flushes supported
 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3
hdb: ATAPI 24X DVD-ROM DVD-R-RAM CD-R/RW drive, 1419kB Cache, UDMA(33)

Kernel versions I tried (the problem appeared in both):
- 2.6.21 with CK patchset
- 2.6.21.5 with Gentoo patchset (http://dev.gentoo.org/~dsd/genpatches) 
(gentoo-sources-2.6.21-r3 package in Gentoo's repository)

There was no particularly heavy IDE load during the freezes.

If I can be of help with more information, please tell me what you need.

Patrick.

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Re: Random freezes with libata + ICH7 PATA

[Tejun Heo]

Patrick Nagel wrote:
> If I can be of help with more information, please tell me what you need.

Full dmesg including boot log would be a nice place to start.  Did the
kernel say anything during or after such freezes?

-- 
tejun

Re: Random freezes with libata + ICH7 PATA

[Patrick Nagel]

Hi again,

>> If I can be of help with more information, please tell me what you need.
>
> Full dmesg including boot log would be a nice place to start.  Did the
> kernel say anything during or after such freezes?
>
> --
> tejun

I'm very sorry, this was a false alarm / false assumption.

Today, after many days without a freeze, my system just froze in the same
manner as I described in the original mail to this list. This is _without_
libata. So it turns out that libata at most has an influence on the
system, so that this problem occurs more frequently, but this is also not
sure.

I'll investigate this further and declare this thread officially closed -
forget about it. ;)

Patrick.

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