Re: How does the disk buffer cache work?

["John Bäckstrand" <sandos@home.se>]

Matthew Zahorik wrote:
>
> Earlier I wrote to the list where my SS10 hung on the
partition check
> if a bad disk was installed.
>
> This behavior is new to the 2.4.20 kernel.  I
previously ran 2.2.20 on the
> machine. (the default in a Debian 3.0r0 install)  I
can't vouch for 2.4
> kernels previous to 2.4.20.
>
> I have traced the problem to a hang in the one of the
disk buffer caches.
>
> Can anyone tell me how to correct the behavior so
that I:
>
> 1.  Don't break things for other parts of the kernel
> 2.  The disk cache will return with an error for a
hung disk?
>
> Here's the tail of the console with debugging
printk's inserted:
>
> ...
> [.. the next function call in read_cache_page() is
lock_page(), which we
> hang forever on ..]

This happens to me aswell. 2.5.35(I think) and 2.4.20
is not working, a slackware 2.2 bootdisk is fine though
so something is wrong. The hdd is fine in DOS aswell.

---
John Bäckstrand