Re: XFS shutting down due to IO timeout on SATA disk (pata_via for CX700)

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

(please try to wrap paragraphs for 80 column)

Hello,

Bruno Prémont wrote:
> Since some time one of my systems "freezes" after limited uptime (a
> few hours), usually during package compilation process.  This seems
> to happen only with recent kernel versions (2.6.27-rc*), don't
> remember if it also happened with 2.6.26 (though I'm pretty sure it
> did not happen with early 2.6.2x series) Unfortunately this always
> shutdowns the root filesystem rendering system unusable.
>
> The kernel output below was generated by 2.6.27-rc5-git9, same
> symptoms happened with other -rc releases of 2.6.27 though I
> couldn't look at dmesg because it happens to / and I only enabled
> networked syslog pretty recently on that box in order to find out
> what happens.
>
>  Unfortunately either the chipset or the BIOS do not support AHCI,
> for the SATA controller as the only choice for SATA offered by BIOS
> is: IDE.
> 
> Is this a known issue? At least there seem to be similar ATA
> exceptions happening lately according to search results returned by
> google when looking for the error messages (exception and
> originating command).

> Kernel error output related to XFS shutdown:
> [ 9352.420180] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
> [ 9352.420247] ata1.00: cmd ea/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0
> [ 9352.420261]          res 40/00:01:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)

Timeout on FLUSH_EXT.  That's a bad sign.  Patch to retry FLUSH is
pending but at any rate FLUSH failure is often accompanied by loss of
data and XFS is doing the right thing of giving up on it.

Can you please post the result of "smartctl -a /dev/sda"?

-- 
tejun