Re: APM-related crashes (flaky IDE RESET)

Mark Lord (mlord@pobox.com)
Wed, 19 May 1999 10:29:28 -0400


David Monniaux wrote:
>
> On Sat, 15 May 1999, Pavel Machek wrote:
>
> > > My Olivetti laptop has undergone two scary crashes lately. The sequence
> > > seems to be:
> > > 1. APM standby (suspend to disk works)
> > > 2. After coming back, the keyboard doesn't work anymore (though the mouse
> > > still moves, which indicates X and gpm are still alive)
>
> This time, I saw what happened. The hard disk gets stopped throughout
> standby. At the next hard disk access, the kernel sees the hard disk
> (hda) is "busy", resets ide0 (success), sees hda as busy, resets ide0 and
> so on...

No, the problem is that the chipset in the laptop has extra registers
to power-down circuitry, like the IDE, when power management is
activated by the BIOS. The Linux IDE driver has no knowledge of
those chipsets, and therefore does not know anything about how to
turn them back on again so it can talk to the drives.

Note that this is separate from the logic/control for spinning down/up
the drives themselves, which linux already handles just fine.

Support for that could be added someday to the linux power mgmt code.

-- 
mlord@pobox.com

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