Re: 2.a.30-rc7: fat filesystem misdetected as amiga

From: Alan Stern
Date: Tue May 26 2009 - 10:04:15 EST


On Tue, 26 May 2009, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:

> On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 05:08:12PM -0400, Alan Stern wrote:
> > On Mon, 25 May 2009, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> >
> > > > So apparently this is a bug in the device; it doesn't respond correctly
> > > > to the first READ command. But since it does respond correctly to
> > > > later commands, everything works okay thereafter. You ought to be able
> > > > to recover from the error by running
> > > >
> > > > blockdev --rereadpt /dev/sdb
> > > >
> > > > manually.
> > >
> > > Yes, this helps.
> > > Would it make sense for kernel to retry automatically?
> > > Why doesn't it?
> >
> > I don't know the details in this case. Most likely the error code
> > (Logical Block Address Out of Range) is interpreted as a fatal
> > non-retryable error. For other sorts of errors, the kernel does retry.
>
> Who would know? The scsi crowd?

They would know. But it's easy enough to find out. (Looks through
the SCSI code...) Here we go. scsi_io_completion() contains this:

case ILLEGAL_REQUEST:
/* If we had an ILLEGAL REQUEST returned, then
* we may have performed an unsupported
* command. The only thing this should be
* would be a ten byte read where only a six
* byte read was supported. Also, on a system
* where READ CAPACITY failed, we may have
* read past the end of the disk.
*/
if ((cmd->device->use_10_for_rw &&
sshdr.asc == 0x20 && sshdr.ascq == 0x00) &&
(cmd->cmnd[0] == READ_10 ||
cmd->cmnd[0] == WRITE_10)) {
/* This will issue a new 6-byte command. */
cmd->device->use_10_for_rw = 0;
action = ACTION_REPREP;
} else if (sshdr.asc == 0x10) /* DIX */ {
description = "Host Data Integrity Failure";
action = ACTION_FAIL;
error = -EILSEQ;
} else
action = ACTION_FAIL;
break;

Since the Sense Key value was ILLEGAL_REQUEST and the ASC value wasn't
0x10 or 0x20, action gets set to ACTION_FAIL. Hence the command is not
retried.

In the end, there's a limit to how far the kernel should go in
compensating for buggy devices. Your device may well have passed that
limit.

Alan Stern

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