From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jens Axboe Subject: Re: SuSE hwinfo/yast2 still confusing SYM53C8XX, killing tape backups (was: [BK PATCH] SCSI -rc1 fixes) Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 12:17:23 +0100 Message-ID: <20041122111722.GC10463@suse.de> References: <1100467267.23710.7.camel@mulgrave> <4197E4B7.3050008@pobox.com> <1100473795.23649.26.camel@mulgrave> <1100477105.24921.3.camel@mulgrave> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from ns.virtualhost.dk ([195.184.98.160]:28049 "EHLO virtualhost.dk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262025AbUKVLSi (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 Nov 2004 06:18:38 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-scsi-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org To: Steffen Winterfeldt Cc: Matthias Andree , James Bottomley , Jeff Garzik , Andrew Morton , Linus Torvalds , SCSI Mailing List On Mon, Nov 22 2004, Steffen Winterfeldt wrote: > On Mon, 15 Nov 2004, Matthias Andree wrote: > > > James Bottomley writes: > > > > > Well, I think we're stuck on that one. SUSE doesn't seem willing to > > > debug hwscan enough to give a coherent description of the problem or a > > > non hwscan test case and no-one else wants to take hwscan apart to find > > > out exactly what it is doing. > > Sorry for the late response; I'm just back from vacation. > > > Steffen, SuSE's hwinfo package throws parity errors on SYM53C8xx > > hardware. Same issue with all kernels SuSE shipped for 9.1 including > > the current 2.6.5-7.111 kernel as well as vanilla 2.6.9. > > hwinfo-8.62-0.2. hotplugctl-0.08-256 - yet another undocumented piece of > > who-knows-what-its-good-for. > > > > Common trouble introduced by running yast2 or hwinfo is SCSI parity > > error, phase mismatch, bus reset and sometimes the machine going out to > > lunch for 2 minutes. It is unclear whether hwinfo probes the hardware > > directly, confusing the sym53c8xx, or uses some SCSI ioctl that confuses > > the adaptor. Please help finding _this_ out and if it's hwinfo hacking > > PCI registers directly, don't do that on ncr/sym/lsi53c8xx and 53c1010 > > chips. > > hwinfo is just a normal program and doesn't do any special tricks on > hardware. In particular, it issues an scsi inquiry command to get the serial > number, but that's about all. > > If running just hwinfo breaks things for you, you might try running it > through strace and look at the files it accesses. Maybe that gives some hint > to narrow things down. hwinfo needs to be updated to use SG_IO, there are too many things that can go wrong with SCSI_IOCTL_SEND_COMMAND (it's far too easy to confuse the device or adapter). -- Jens Axboe