RE: [PATCH RESEND 1/2] Drivers: scsi: storvsc: Set the scsi resultcorrectly when SRB status is INVALID

[James Bottomley]

On Mon, 2012-03-19 at 22:52 +0000, KY Srinivasan wrote:
> > >  However, keep in mind
> > > that there is no current ETA on when Windows will ship with these changes -
> > Windows 8
> > > may ship with code where they would return an invalid SRB status, but they are
> > not
> > > setting the sense code, hence this patch. When the Window host does the
> > "right thing"
> > > I will clean this up, but I don't know when that will be.
> > 
> > I thought you just said you'd only just asked them if they could
> > implemented it, in which case no version of windows currently ships with
> > this, correct?
> 
> There are some private builds of windows 8 floating around with this change, where
> they are returning ILLEGAL_REQUEST SRB status  without any sense data.

Sure, but they're not shipped, right ... it's like the test builds we do
for large companies like IBM and HP to try out certain things before
deciding they don't work.

> > > More importantly, the second patch  in this series where I filter out
> > > the ATA_16 command
> > > on the guest is really important for us. Without that patch on a range
> > > on windows hosts
> > > including the current beta version of windows8 where the host is
> > > returning a generic
> > > error in response to ATA_16 command, we cannot boot many Linux
> > > distros. If you
> > > prefer, I can drop the first patch and re-submit the second patch for
> > > consideration now.
> > 
> > I'm not sure about that either.  You presumably translate
> > SRB_STATUS_ERROR into DID_TARGET_FAILURE.  That should cause the
> > termination of the command with prejudice in exactly the same way as an
> > ILLEGAL_REQUEST sense code would (minus the useful error information),
> > so what's causing the boot failure?
> 
> You are right, currently without a proper SRB code, I do a DID_TARGET_FAILURE and
> this results in the device being offlined and if the device happens to be the root device,
> we obviously cannot boot. I have seen this problem with sles11 sp2 on a win8 box.

OK, so this may be the root cause of the problem.  DID_TARGET_FAILURE
returns FAILED from scsi_decide_disposition().  This wakes up the error
handler to retry the command and, since the command is never going to
work, this ends up offlining the device.  The same thing will happen for
every command with no recovery.

The question now is, what else returns SRB_STATUS_ERROR?  If it's always
for stuff that's unretryable, then the DID_ error is wrong and you
should be returning DID_PASSTHROUGH with an error code and the problem
will be solved.  If we can get SRB_STATUS_ERROR on retryable commands,
then you discriminate at the point of failure, not at the point of input
and return DID_TARGET_FAILURE for the ones that should be retried and
DID_PASSTHROUGH + error for the ones that shouldn't.  This will ensure
the driver is completely backwards compatible and that it will work
if/when windows properly handles the commands.

James


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