Re: 2.6.24 + ICH8M + high SATA load == death

[Robert Hancock <hancockr@shaw.ca>]

Jeffrey Baker wrote:
> On 2.6.24 with a SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM
> (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03) and a   Vendor: ATA
> Model: SAMSUNG MCBQE32G Rev: PS10 flash disk, I get this error when
> doing 32 parallel runs of pgbench:
> 
> ata1.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x50000 action 0xa frozen
> ata1.00: irq_stat 0x00400001, PHY RDY changed
> ata1: SError: { PHYRdyChg CommWake }
> ata1.00: cmd c8/00:10:67:38:97/00:00:00:00:00/e1 tag 0 dma 8192 in
>          res 50/00:00:76:38:97/00:00:00:00:00/e1 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
> ata1.00: status: { DRDY }
> 
> Afterwards the machine was in some kind of bad state where it would do
> only about 1MB/s to the disk, and I had to power it off.
> 
> Basically I have no idea what any of that gibberish means.  Note that
> this device is about 80 times faster than the spinning disk it
> replaced, so it may be stressing parts of the software that are not
> normally stressed.  Note also that it could just be crap hardware.  I
> don't really know.  However, I do note that someone recently posted a
> very similar error using Western Digital disks and the same SATA
> controller.  I don't think the problem is cables, since this is a
> laptop.  Any advice welcome.

PHYRdyChg in SError basically means that the controller detected that 
the drive disconnected or lost communication with it. Almost certainly a 
hardware problem of some sort. Power issue, perhaps?