Re: document ext3 requirements

Alan Cox
2009-01-05T11:20:25Z

> That would be true if the disk hardware wasn't doing a gazillion retries to
> read a bad sector internally (taking 5 seconds to come back and report
> failure), and then the darn scsi layer added another gazillion retries on top
> of that, and the two multiply together to make it so slow that that when you
> leave the thing copying the disk overnight it's STILL not done 24 hours later.
> Going in and cherry picking individual files looks kind of appealing in that
> situation.

You could of course just learn to use the functions the kernel provides.
If you want to recover disk blocks without retrying you can do that via
SG_IO. If you want to adjust the timeout and retry levels you can do that
too via sysfs.

Alan