Re: SMART problems in 2.6.22

From: Bruce Allen
Date: Sun Jul 08 2007 - 21:14:34 EST


Here is another similar report:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.utilities.smartmontools/4704/match=diamondmax

Again, this indicates that SMART is enabled. But it's not clear what the kernel version here is. The report indicates that the problem started with an FC7 kernel upgrade

Bruce

On Sun, 8 Jul 2007, Bruce Allen wrote:

Mark, David, Doug, Tejin, Alan, Jeff, LKML,

I'm afraid that there may be some problem with SMART + libata in the 2.6.22 kernel. An hour ago I discovered that I missed a month of correspondence (some LKML, some private) about this problem which Alan, Tejun, Jeff, Mark and others copied to me -- it was automatically shoved into one of my mailboxes by my mail client. Sorry about that. So I am trying to catch up to see if there is some real problem or not.

Here is a typical bug report that worries me:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.utilities.smartmontools/4712

Here is another similar report:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.utilities.smartmontools/4713

And another report:
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg358354.html

From some of the earlier threads that I missed (below) I have the impression that the problem may be a very simple one, namely that starting with 2.6.22 one needs to run a command to enable SMART when a box is first booted -- the kernel no longer does this as part of the init/setup of the disks. But that is NOT consistent with the first two reports above, which show 'SMART ENABLED'.

Here are some of the earlier threads that I completely missed:

http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0706.1/0849.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg164863.html

Before I go off half-cocked, could anyone shed some light on this? Is there a real problem here or just something dumb?

Cheers,
Bruce

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/