Re: MD/RAID time out writing superblock

Tejun Heo
2009-09-14T13:05:23Z

Mark Lord wrote:
> Tejun Heo wrote:
> ..
>> Oooh, another possibility is the above continuous IDENTIFY tries.
>> Doing things like that generally isn't a good idea because vendors
>> don't expect IDENTIFY to be mixed regularly with normal IOs and
>> firmwares aren't tested against that. Even smart commands sometimes
>> cause problems. So, finding out the thing which is obsessed with the
>> identity of the drive and stopping it might help.
> ..
>
> Bullpucky. That sort of thing, specifically with IDENTIFY,
> has never been an issue.

With SMART it has. I wouldn't be too surprised if some new firmware
chokes on repeated IDENTIFY mixed with stream of NCQ commands. It's
just not something people (including vendors) do regularly.

> I wonder if the IDENTIFY is actually coming from libata EH
> after something else failed ?

In that case, libata-eh would print "ataP.DD: failed to IDENTIFY
(blah, err_mask=0x%x\n" instead of the full TF dump.

Thanks.

--
tejun