Re: [PATCH 0/1] Summary: hwmon driver for temperature sensors on SATA drives

From: Damien Le Moal
Date: Tue Dec 17 2019 - 00:50:27 EST


On 2019/12/17 12:57, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> On 12/16/19 6:35 PM, Martin K. Petersen wrote:
>>
>> Guenter,
>>
>>> If and when drives are detected which report bad information, such
>>> drives can be added to a blacklist without impact on the core SCSI or
>>> ATA code. Until that happens, not loading the driver solves the
>>> problem on any affected system.
>>
>> My only concern with that is that we'll have blacklisting several
>> places. We already have ATA and SCSI blacklists. If we now add a third
>> place, that's going to be a maintenance nightmare.
>>
>> More on that below.
>>
>>>> My concerns are wrt. identifying whether SMART data is available for
>>>> USB/UAS. I am not too worried about ATA and "real" SCSI (ignoring RAID
>>>> controllers that hide the real drives in various ways).
>>
>> OK, so I spent my weekend tinkering with 15+ years of accumulated USB
>> devices. And my conclusion is that no, we can't in any sensible manner,
>> support USB storage monitoring in the kernel. There is no heuristic that
>> I can find that identifies that "this is a hard drive or an SSD and
>> attempting one of the various SMART methods may be safe". As opposed to
>> "this is a USB key that's likely to lock up if you try". And that's
>> ignoring the drives with USB-ATA bridges that I managed to wedge in my
>> attempt at sending down commands.
>>
>> Even smartmontools is failing to work on a huge part of my vintage
>> collection. Thanks to a wide variety of bridges with random, custom
>> interfaces.
>>
>> So my stance on all this is that I'm fine with your general approach for
>> ATA. I will post a patch adding the required bits for SCSI. And if a
>> device does not implement either of the two standard methods, people
>> should use smartmontools.
>>
>> Wrt. name, since I've added SCSI support, satatemp is a bit of a
>> misnomer. drivetemp, maybe? No particular preference.
>>
> Agreed, if we extend this to SCSI, satatemp is less than perfect.
> drivetemp ? disktemp ? I am open to suggestions, with maybe a small
> personal preference for disktemp out of those two.

"disk" tend to imply HDD, excluding SSDs. So my vote goes to
"drivetemp", or even the more generic, "devtemp".


--
Damien Le Moal
Western Digital Research