Re: RFC: detection of silent corruption via ATA long sector reads

[Robert Hancock <hancockr@shaw.ca>]

Greg Freemyer wrote:
> All,
> 
> On the mdraid list, there was a recent thread about using raid
> functionality to detect / repair silent corruption.
> 
> The issues brought up were that a lot of silent data corruption occurs
> when cables, controllers, power supplies, ram, cache, etc. goes bad.
> 
> It made me think about another option for detecting silent corruption
> I have not seen discussed, but maybe I missed it.
> 
> Aiui, the ATA spec allows for the reading of a long sector as well as
> the normal 512 byte sector.  When you get a long sector you also get
> the CRC (or whatever checksum data there is on the disk that allows
> the drive itself to detect media errors).
> 
> I don't have any idea how easy or hard it would be to do, but I would
> like to see the entire block subsystem enhanced to optionally allow
> long sector reads to be used in a "paranoid" fashion.
> 
> Effectively it would be:
> 
> 1) Read long sector from drive:  verify CRC in kernel.  This tests
> most everything on the i/o path.
> 
> 2) maintain CRC type information in block subsystem.  Verify no
> corruption just before handing off to userspace.  This would
> potentially identify CPU/cache/RAM failures.

Even if the drive supports those commands the problem is the CRC/ECC 
data is in a vendor-specific format, so it couldn't be processed 
generically.