ad0: FAILURE - WRITE_DMA

[Mikhail P.]

On Sunday 10 October 2004 08:59, Søren Schmidt wrote:
> There is definitly something fishy here, since I dont have either the
> disks nor any VIA chips here in the lab I cannot do any testing here.
> However I dont know of any problems with the VIA chips in this regard,
> so that leaves the disks for scrutiny. One thing to try is change the
> tripping point where we switch from 28bit mode to 48 bit mode, could be
> a 1 off error in the firmware...

I apologize for bumping that old thread..
I have received both 200G drives (the ones that were giving me "adX: FAILURE - 
WRITE_DMA" on 5.2.1 system).
I have plugged both drives into running 4.10 system, re-formatted them to UFS1 
from sysinstall. After filling those drives with 180G of data each (files 
ranging in size from 10k to 1G), I did a lot of load on them (e.g. transfered 
data between other drives in the system, deleted random files, "dd", etc) and 
those adX failures did not appear anymore (in fact, I'm running those drives 
on the file server for 5 days now, and there is no single failure/timeout so 
far - system has been very stable all the time on FreeBSD-4.10)

On the side note - I did changes to the tripping point as suggested above and 
re-compiled kernel on 5.2.1 running system - disk operations dramatically 
decreased as expected, but number of timeouts decreased too (per dmesg - 
one-two timeouts in 3-4 days).

I should probably also note another interesting thing - on another system with 
4 hard drives (20G, 60G, 120G, 200G) where I ran RELENG_5 for the past week, 
timeouts and failures were appearing randomly under heavy disk writes.
That system had a mix of filesystems - primary 20G drive had UFS2, and the 
rest of the drives were UFS1 (as they hold data, and I ran 4.7 on that system 
half a year ago) - data transfer between interfaces was horrible, less than 
8-10mb/sec, even when system was IDLE.
After re-installing system to 4.10 (no changes to hardware/etc - all remained 
the same apart from OS), I don't see timeouts/errors anymore, and speed of 
transfers between the drives got back to 20-25mb/sec, that's including that 
system isn't IDLE.

There is also a third system with 2 x 200G ide drives and FBSD-5.2.1. Today, I 
had to transfer approx. 160G of data from one of the drives to another system 
via NFS, and unfortunately some files could not be transfered due to the same 
ad1 failures as above.. I'm going to mount drive in "ro", to finish the 
transfer.

regards,
M.