Re: [PATCH] sata_nv ADMA/NCQ support for nForce4 (updated) II

Robert Hancock
2006-10-22T07:10:08Z

Andi Kleen wrote:
> Andi Kleen <ak@suse.de> writes:
>
>> I tested it on a NF4-Professional system with 8GB RAM and a single
>> SATA disk. It first did nicely in LTP and some other tests,
>> but during a bonnie++ run it eventually blocked with all
>> IO hanging forever. No output either. I did a full backtrace
>> and it just showed the processes waiting for a IO wakeup.
>
> Hmm, to follow myself up: after a few more minutes the machine recovered
> and i could log in again (overall the stall was at least 5+ minutes
> though)
>
> Not sure whom to blame, the IO driver might be actually innocent
> and it just be one of the usual known but unfixed IO starvation problems.
>
> -Andi

Hmm.. The system hanging up for 5 minutes and then recovering seems
rather odd, as far as I know the timeouts in libata are all quite a bit
shorter than that. Was there anything unusual in dmesg? If the IO
commands weren't completing at the driver level then I would expect the
error handling to kick in in some fashion..