Re: sata_nv and 2.6.24 (was Re: fixed a bug of adma in rhel4u5 withHDS7250SASUN500G.)

From: Jeff Garzik
Date: Wed Jan 23 2008 - 20:42:46 EST


Robert Hancock wrote:
Jeff Garzik wrote:
Ping... sata_nv status is still a bit open for 2.6.24, and I would like to move us forward a bit.

* Kuan's patch... it has been confirmed (and is needed), correct? can someone work up a good patch for 2.6.24? The only one I ever received was badly word-wrapped, and at the time, Robert seemed uncertain of it, so I waited.

I can get you one later today hopefully.


* ADMA ATAPI 4GB issues... playing tricks with the ordering of allocations and DMA masks is just way too fragile. We just cannot guarantee that all allocators work that way. The obvious solution to me seems to be hardcoding the consistent DMA mask to 32-bit, but using 64-bit for regular dma mask if-and-only-if ADMA is enabled.

That's not enough to fix the problem since there's issues with actual transfer data being allocated above 4GB as well, not just the consistent allocations (it appears that blk_queue_bounce_limit setting to 32-bit doesn't prevent this on x86_64). Either we play some funky games with changing the DMA mask of the entire device to 32-bit if either port is in ATAPI mode (which blew up when I tried it) or we add the ability to set the DMA mask independently on each port (like by setting the mask on the SCSI device and using that for DMA mapping instead) which requires core changes.

Its all funky games that no other driver is doing... There is one guaranteed to work scenario -- set all masks and bounce limits etc. to 32-bit. There is also one highly-likely-to-work scenario, disabling ADMA by default.


* it sure seems like there are other open sata_nv ADMA issues -- can we hard-confirm or deny this? bugzilla wasn't very helpful for me. It doesn't seem like we can disable ADMA (to solve those issues) and get enough test time in (which is what I said a week (or more?) ago too...)

The NCQ/non-NCQ command switching issue is still hitting some people (last I heard Kuan was looking into this), also there's a hotplug issue that Tejun reported..

The former implies we need to disable swncq for 2.6.24, if it's not stable yet.

Jeff


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