Re: Nasty IDE crasher in 2.6.9rc1

From: Jens Axboe
Date: Fri Sep 03 2004 - 10:36:44 EST


On Fri, Sep 03 2004, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Gwe, 2004-09-03 at 15:50, Jens Axboe wrote:
> > (suse.dk is not related to suse.de and it helpfully eats all messages
> > sent to unknown users. not so great :(
>
> Ah sorry.
>
> > > Another problem with barrier is that it can take several minutes worst case
> > > for the command to complete on a large modern drive (timings c/o friendly
> > > ide drive engineer). That causes two problems I've pointed out to Jens that
> > > we need to fix before barriers are IMHO production grade
> >
> > Can you pass me his results?
>
> I can ask. Its NDA data (not Maxtor). Or Eric might have public info ?
> The later mail I reported my tests trying to make it as slow as possible
> and I couldn't get worse than 7 seconds for the command.

IIRC, 7 seconds is the magic number that Microsoft uses for when a
command times out in the kernel... That might make the results a little
suspicious :)

>
> > > 2. The timeouts on the command issue appear to be too small, and
> > > we will time out and reset the drive in loaded situations.
> >
> > You don't seem to address that in your patch?
>
> I'm not sure what the right answer is.

I guess as a first measure just increasing the timeout two-fold will
cover most of the problem.

--
Jens Axboe

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