ATA errors.

Adam K Kirchhoff adamk at voicenet.com
Wed Nov 26 06:16:35 PST 2003


Adam K Kirchhoff <adamk at xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> YONETANI Tomokazu <qhwt at xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Hello.

>> On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 10:41:02PM +0000, Adam K Kirchhoff wrote:
>>> David Cuthbert <dacut at xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> > Adam K Kirchhoff wrote:
>>> >> I know for a fact that ad0, and the cable, are both ATA100.  And I'm
>>> >> highly doubtful that there's anything actually wrong with the drive
>>> >> itself.
>>> >> 
>>> >> Any idea if this might be something with the ata driver?
>>> 
>>> > Even though the cable is rated ATA100, try replacing it.  I've had 
>>> > mysterious errors along these lines vanish (which I attribute to either 
>>> > a few too many kinks in the cable, flaky/oxidized connectors, cable 
>>> > gnomes, ...).
>>> 
>>> > In particular, I've had bad luck with the round cables they sell for 
>>> > improved airflow.
>>> 
>>> Well, I grabbed an un-open cable from work that came with some Western
>>> Digital drives we recently ordered, and I replaced the cable I was using
>>> at home.  Unfortunately, this did not solve the problem, so I'm pretty
>>> convinced this is a driver issue.
>>> 
>>> Is there anyway I could try and debug this further?

>> Adam, have you tried FreeBSD-STABLE, whose kernel built with exactly
>> the same kernel config as DragonFly, on the same computer?
>> I've reported about the same ATA errors in the middle of this month
>> on kernel@, and later on bugs at . There're three DragonFly machines
>> I have access:

>> A. Dynabook: ATA66, 256Mbytes of main RAM, P-III 1.3GHz
>> B. Dell: ATA100, 256Mbytes of main RAM, P-IV 1.7GHz
>> C. Some SiS-MB based: ATA100/133, 512Mbytes of RAM, P-IV 2.4B

>> All three machines are ACPI capable and enabled in the kernel, and
>> none of them are SMP or HTT. All of them are running DragonFly from
>> source as of about a week ago.
>> And Only A and B exhibit the symptom. And on C I've never seen that
>> error messages. On A, I haven't seen the error message while doing
>> buildworld or buildkernel, only when doing fsck on largest partition,
>> even though this one is most actively used machine. And I've never seen
>> the error when running FreeBSD-STABLE on B.

>> At the moment, B is the only machine I can easily switch between
>> DragonFly and FreeBSD-STABLE; I have installed FreeBSD-stable base system
>> into /dev/ad0s1a and DragonFly base system into /dev/ad0s1d. If I have
>> time, I'm going to try different kernel config options to see if I can
>> narrow down which options are tickling kernel.

> Well, I've booted my DragonFly installation with the GENERIC 4.8 kernel
> from FreeBSD.  I was able to succesfully copy /usr/ports (which is NFS
> mounted to another machine) to /usr/ports2 using a tar pipe without so
> much as a peep.  Doing this with the DragonFly kernel, however, is one
> of the things that causes the massive ATA errors and lockups.

> I'll proceed with Matts atacontrol suggestion and I'll also see if I can
> build a FreeBSD kernel with the exact same config file as the DragonFly
> kernel in the near future.

atacontrol mode 0 on DragonFly:

Master = UDMA100
Slave  = UDMA100	(My DragonFly harddrive)

atacontrol mode 1 on DragonFly:

Master = ???		(There's nothing hooked up to it)
Slave  = PIO4

atacontrol mode 0 on FreeBSD 4.8:

Master = UDMA100
Slave  = UDMA100	

atacontrol mode 1 on FreeBSD 4.8:

Master = UDMA100
Slave  = UDMA100

I have also built a 4.8 kernel using the exact same config file I use
for DragonFly, and once again copied the entire ports tree over without
any problems.

Adam







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