usage of the standby immediate command in the ATA driver

[Jay Elliott]

Hi freebsd-drivers,

I'm looking into some issues regarding filesystem corruption with my employer's FreeBSD6-based kernel.  We've consulted with the vendor that supplies our SSDs, and they've told us to make sure that our ATA driver is sending the ATA_STANDBY_IMMEDIATE command to the drive during shutdown after sending the ATA_FLUSHCACHE command.  I've looked into the FreeBSD9.2-version of the ata driver to see if this behavior has been changed, but as far as I can tell it also does not send the ATA_STANDBY_IMMEDATE command from ad_shutdown.

Does anybody know if this is intentional?  I'm inclined to trust newer versions of FreeBSD more than my hardware vendor, but I want to make sure this isn't a mistake.

Also, does anybody know if this behavior has changed in FreeBSD 10?  I've been looking into it myself, but the new version of the ATA driver has changed a lot from the 9.2 version and I'm having some difficulties understanding it.

Thanks for all your help,
Jay