WRITE_DMA failures on 5.3 (but NOT on 4.10)
Peter Risdon
peter at circlesquared.com
Fri Nov 26 05:05:05 PST 2004
Peter Risdon wrote:
> craig wrote:
>
>> hi,
>>
>> i wrote about this issue some weeks back, but have still not yet
>> adequately
>> resolved it.
>> (http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-questions/2004-November/0638
>>
>> 07.html)
>
> [...]
>
>> to repeat the original problem, when installing 5.3R it fails about
>> 12% into
>> extracting base into \
>> on the emergency terminal, there is a stream of warnings and failures
>> reading:
>>
>> WARNING : WRITE_DMA UDMA ICRC ERROR <LBA..... blah
>> FAILURE : WRITE_DMA status = 51<Ready, DSC, error>... blah
>> this continues until i run out of patience.
>
>
> This is a really major problem that has affected every 5.3 and the more
> recent 5.2.1 machines I've operated with largish [1] hard drives. The
> novelty of losing several tens of gigs of data any time a drive gets
> busy wears off fairly quickly.
>
>>
>> the advice i received was :
>
>
> ... mainly about checking hardware, and this is _not_ the issue. I've
> googled extensively on this and, as you did, replaced every hardware
> component in the IDE lines, including the disk drives, without affecting
> the problem.
>
> So far as I can make out, there was a change to default settings at some
> point (I haven't scoured the CVS repository to find out exactly when) to
> enable DMA because some newer drives require this[2].
>
No - apologies for wasting bandwidth. I got to this stage of research
very late a couple of nights ago and see I should have stopped a few
hours earlier. Looking again, this:
hw.ata.atapi_dma: 0
in loader.conf might fix the problem with atapi drives but the
hw.ata.ata_dma: 1
sysctl setting seems to have been the default in 4.10 too, so that can't
be it.
I think I might try turning off ata dma in a 5.3 system anyway, and
putting a big drive under load to see what happens, but I fear I'm
probably back to square one.
Peter.
--
the circle squared
network systems and software
http://www.circlesquared.com
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