Re: BUG and unresponsive system using cdparanoia on 2.6.26

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Mon Aug 04 2008 - 15:54:45 EST


David Greaves wrote:
Hi

2 problems:
* unresponsive system
* BUG

I've been ripping some audio CDs recently under 2.6.26 and sometimes, I assume
when there have been imperfections/retries etc, the system has become
unresponsive - 10s of seconds for mouse movement, keystrokes to respond.

This resulted in many
kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
kernel: hda: drive not ready for command
kernel: hda: status timeout: status=0xff { Busy }

Yeah, presumably the drive has gone off into never never land trying to read the disc for a long time..


top reported very high %si (>95%)


and when I tried (*something*) to recover using:
hdparm -w /dev/hda
hdparm -w /dev/hdb
I got a BUG.

I know it says 'dangerous' - so if the reply is "so don't do that then" I shall
respect it :)
OTOH this may be unexpected so I'm reporting it.

Well, it's likely not "expected", but it's not generally a good thing to do as it triggers not-well-tested code paths.. The IDE layer is supposed to reset the drive itself in this case, and it appears it does.. but then the command likely either gets retried or the next command comes in and stalls the drive out again.


All my drives are on sata channels, I just have a Plextor CDRW and a DVDRW on
the ide channel.

One additional comment, when the CD drive gets into this state, it persists
after a hibernate, cold boot and restore. It is fine after a cold reboot.
This suggests to me that the problem may be in the kernel/driver.

Let me know what else I can provide to help.
In the meantime I'll be trying 2.6.27-rc?

Well, my recommendation would be first to try the newer libata driver for your PATA controller and not use the old IDE layer (CONFIG_IDE). libata drivers should be more robust against this sort of thing..
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