Re: ATA errors.

[Adam K Kirchhoff <adamk@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

YONETANI Tomokazu <qhwt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello.

> On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 10:41:02PM +0000, Adam K Kirchhoff wrote:
>> David Cuthbert <dacut@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@. 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.

Adam