Re: [PATCH] cciss: Ignore stale commands after reboot

Alan D. Brunelle
2009-07-06T20:33:57Z

Hannes Reinecke wrote:
> When doing an unexpected shutdown like kexec the cciss
> firmware might still have some commands in flight, which
> it is trying to complete.
> The driver is doing it's best on resetting the HBA,
> but sadly there's a firmware issue causing the firmware
> _not_ to abort or drop old commands.
> So the firmware will send us commands which we haven't
> accounted for, causing the driver to panic.
>
> With this patch we're just ignoring these commands as
> there is nothing we could be doing with them anyway.
>
> Signed-off-by: Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.de>

Pardon my ignorance here, but don't you have a bigger problem: if the
reset is not dropping or aborting old commands, doesn't this also mean
that these old commands can still be _executing_? In which case any
(old) reads being executed could be scribbling over memory? (Memory that
may be being used for other purposes?)

Alan D. Brunelle