Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATA trouble

[Jeff Garzik]

Jens Axboe wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 30 2003, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> > Hmm. actually I was under influence that we have generic ioctls in 2.6.x,
> > but I can find only BLKSECTGET, BLKSECTSET was somehow lost.  Jens?
>
>
> Probably because it's very dangerous to expose, echo something too big
> and watch your data disappear.


IMO, agreed.

Max KB per request really should be set by the driver, as it's a 
hardware-specific thing that (as we see :)) is often errata-dependent.

Tangent:  My non-pessimistic fix will involve submitting a single sector 
DMA r/w taskfile manually, then proceeding with the remaining sectors in 
another r/w taskfile.  This doubles the interrupts on the affected 
chipset/drive combos, but still allows large requests.  I'm not terribly 
fond of partial completions, as I feel they add complexity, particularly 
so in my case:  I can simply use the same error paths for both the 
single-sector taskfile and the "everything else" taskfile, regardless of 
which taskfile throws the error.

(thinking out loud)  Though best for simplicity, I am curious if a 
succession of "tiny/huge" transaction pairs are efficient?  I am hoping 
that the drive's cache, coupled with the fact that each pair of 
taskfiles is sequentially contiguous, will not hurt speed too much over 
a non-errata configuration...

	Jeff



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