ad0: FAILURE - WRITE_DMA

[Martin Nilsson]

Mikhail P. wrote:
> Well, now those timeouts popped up on 5.3-BETA7 system with 4 IDE drives.. 
> They start appearing with high disk activity.
> System had FreeBSD-4.7 prior to that, and has been rock solid for almost a 
> year. Drives have no problems, that's for sure (4.7 did not show up any 
> timeouts, with uptime for months)..
> 
> I don't know what to think - is ATA driver horribly broken in 5.x?

Something is rotten with ATA on 5.x (or I have a rotten motherboard!)
I have an E7320 "Lindenhurst VS ICH5R box" with 2*3GHz EM64T Xeons and 
2*80GB Seagate SATA disks. Sometimes when booting the whole ATA/SATA 
system hangs after two READ_DMA or WRITE_DMA timeout errors. This seems 
to more common when running as AMD64 than i386. I can't remember any 
hangs after the machine have been up nicely for a couple of min.

The 1U box is so noisy that I can't be in the apartment at the same time 
without going crazy, this and that I can't reproduce it reliably 
effectively prevents most debugging attempts.

	/Martin