Re: sata_nv - ADMA issues with 2.6.20

[Robert Hancock <hancockr@shaw.ca>]

Björn Steinbrink wrote:
> If the look like this, you might want to try a few patches that are in
> -mm.
> 
> ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
> ata1.00: cmd e7/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0 out
>          res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
> ata1: soft resetting port
> 
> We thought that Robert had fixed these with some changes that went into
> -rc6. But they reappeared a few days later, the -mm patches seem to have
>  finally cured it.
> 
> The original patches are here:
> 
> http://www2.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.20-rc6/2.6.20-rc6-mm3/broken-out/sata_nv-cleanup-adma-error-handling-v2.patch
> http://www2.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.20-rc6/2.6.20-rc6-mm3/broken-out/sata_nv-cleanup-adma-error-handling-v2-cleanup.patch
> http://www2.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.20-rc6/2.6.20-rc6-mm3/broken-out/sata_nv-use-adma-for-nodata-commands.patch
> 
> As they had a few rejects against 2.6.20-rc7, I'm attaching my fixed all-in-one version of these patches, I guess it should apply to 2.6.20 just fine.

This isn't quite the same as that problem we were seeing, these are an 
actual NCQ read/write that is timing out and not a cache flush command. 
Nevertheless it wouldn't hurt for people having this problem to test out 
the latest and greatest sata_nv patches. In particular there was one 
that I resurrected from the debugging of that problem, "sata_nv: wait 
for response on entering/leaving ADMA mode" which though it didn't end 
up fixing it, seemed like a good thing to be doing anyway, and which 
potentially might have some effect on this problem here.

All the patches I have for sata_nv are in Linus' git tree, that is 
probably a simpler way to test them than -mm right now - applying the 
2.6.20-git6 patch on top of 2.6.20 should do it.

-- 
Robert Hancock      Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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