From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Tejun Heo Subject: Re: Corrupt data - RAID sata_sil 3114 chip Date: Wed, 07 Jan 2009 13:59:48 +0900 Message-ID: <496436C4.4070305@kernel.org> References: <200901032104.15242.bs@q-leap.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <200901032104.15242.bs@q-leap.de> Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Bernd Schubert Cc: Robert Hancock , Alan Cox , Justin Piszcz , debian-user@lists.debian.org, linux-raid@vger.kernel.org, linux-ide@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Hello, Bernd Schubert wrote: > But now more than a year has passed again without doing anything > about it and actually this is what I strongly criticize. Most people > don't know about issues like that and don't run file checksum tests > as I now always do before taking a disk into production. So users > are exposed to known data corruption problems without even being > warned about it. Usually even backups don't help, since one creates > a backup of the corrupted data. sata_sil being one of the most popular controllers && data corruption reports seem to be concentrated on certain chipsets, I don't think it's a wide spread problem. In some cases, the corruption was very reproducible too. I think it's something related to setting up the PCI side of things. There have been hints that incorrect CLS setting was the culprit and I tried thte combinations but without any success and unfortunately the problem wasn't reproducible with the hardware I have here. :-( Anyways, there was an interesting report that updating the BIOS on the controller fixed the problem. http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10480 Taking "lspci -nnvvvxxx" output of before and after such BIOS update will shed some light on what's really going on. Can you please try that? > So IMHO, the driver should be deactived for sil3114 until a real > solution is found. And it only should be possible to force activate > it by a kernel flag, which then also would print a huuuge warning > about possible data corruption (unfortunately most distributions > disables inital kernel messages *grumble*). The problem is serious but the scope is quite limited and we can't tell where the problem lies, so I'm not too sure about taking such drastic measure. Grumble... Yeah, I really want to see this long standing problem fixed. To my knowledge, this is one of two still open data corruption bugs - the other one being via putting CDB bytes into burnt CD/DVDs. So, if you can try the BIOS update thing, please give it a shot. Thanks. -- tejun