> > Now that the Smart Suite S.M.A.R.T. applications are unmaintained, would
>
> what happened?
I'm not sure, but the last update to the S.M.A.R.T. Suite website, on 3 July this year, says that the page and the applications are no longer maintained.
Seems the Beta of version 2.0 never got finished either :-(.
> > there be any chance of implementing S.M.A.R.T. in to the kernel IDE code?
>
> what would be the benefit? as I understand it, smart is really
> a means of reporting long-term disk status, which is optimally done
> by user-space. even something exotic like failing over to a spare disk
> would clearly be best done in user-space.
You are right, the idea is to monitor the smart info, ideally from when the drive is new, but at least over a period of time, so that a change in it's behavior shows up.
> > I know the IDE code is already a nightmare, but it would be a nice feature.
>
> what did you have in mind?
Well, nothing very exotic, just some sanity checks on the SMART data when the IDE and SCSI interfaces are probed for devices. Something like:
* Device supports/does not support following SMART features:
* General attributes
* Vendor attributes
* Error log
* Selftest log
* Drive info
* SMART is currently enabled/disabled
* Total power-on time is currently foo hours
* Warning if any of the following is excessive:
* Last spin up time
* Calibration retry count
* UDMA CRC Error count
> > S.M.A.R.T. is terribly under used at the moment - most people don't even
> > know what it is. Infact, I could be wrong, but isn't a subset of
> > S.M.A.R.T. implemented on modern SCSI disks, too?
>
> I know that most people don't run it, but other than that, how is it
> underused?
Well, I can't see any reason for *not* using it where available - who wouldn't appreciate a warning on boot up, 'oh, by the way, /dev/hda is about to die in a couple of days :-)'
> > Monitoring of any kind is always a nice feature to have...
>
> certainly, though that doesn't mean it should move from userspace to
> kernel...
Agreed, there isn't any point in doing monitoring in kernelspace, but capabilities reporting, and sanity checks on boot might be useful.
John.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Sep 07 2002 - 22:00:31 EST