Re: [2.4.21] Spurious ABORTs

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@SteelEye.com>]

On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 12:18 -0400, Bagalkote, Sreenivas wrote:
> When I return SUCCESS to the spurious ABORTs, the systems keeps
> running. I am getting aborts for commands that I completed as
> early as 60+ seconds ago. Could somebody please tell me what in
> SCSI layer can cause it to do this?

Well, 2.4 is somewhat more eccentric than 2.6 as far as SCSI goes.
However, I can guess about this one.  If a command is completed after it
times out, you still get error handling for it (this is actually still
true in 2.6).  When the system becomes aware of a need for error
handling it quiesces the driver (i.e. waits for all outstanding commands
to time out or return) before beginning the eh thread.  So, if a bunch
of commands are failing, you can complete one that has already timed out
and still receive an ABORT for it ages afterwards.

James