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

[Mark Lord <liml@rtr.ca>]

Tejun Heo wrote:
> 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.
...
>> 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)
..

Bruno, please also post the output from these commands:

   hdparm --Istdout /dev/sda
   smartctl -data -a /dev/sda

Thanks.

> 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.
..

Tejun, are we *sure* that's really a timeout?
The status shows 0x40 "drive ready" there, aka. "command complete". 

I have a client who is also seeing this exact scenario on 750GB drives,
using a patched SLES10 kernel (2.6.16 + libata from 2.6.18 or so).

Smartctl output is clean (no logged errors), and the drives themselves
are fine after a reboot -- necessary since libata/scsi kicked the drive out
of the RAID array.

Something strange is going on here.

????