Stress testing and TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA

Daniel Gerzo danger at rulez.sk
Sun Sep 11 13:34:54 PDT 2005


Hi Anthony,

Sunday, September 11, 2005, 10:18:36 PM, you has on mind:

> I'm not seeing much in the way of responses to this post from
> freebsd-questions, so I thought I'd take it to freebsd-stable, where it
> is probably more relevant. ;-)

> Please see my original thread on freebsd-questions for context.

> On Fri, 26 Aug 2005 03:21:35 -0600 Anthony Chavez <acc at anthonychavez.org> wrote:

>> My question is simply this: is the fact that I received 4 TIMEOUT
>> warnings in the space of roughly 2 weeks significant cause for concern?

> Apparently, the fact that the stress tool produced so few warnings may
> have given me a false sense of security.  I'm being treated to the
> following messages (81 in total) today, after 8 days uptime:

> Sep  6 11:35:27 mybox kernel: ad0: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=8348191
> ...
> Sep  6 18:59:09 mybox kernel: ad0: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=8348383
> Sep  6 19:04:58 mybox kernel: ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=61749183

> The READ_DMA timeouts are happening very infrequently, but it's worth
> mentioning that I'm seeing them now in addition.

> This is quite disturbing, particularly when the machine in question is
> *in*production.*

I thing you should really quickly look for backuping your data. When
I was seeing this kind of messages last time, my disk died after 3
days from time they started showing up in my log files. I wasn't able
to write any data to the disk (system just sudennly paniced, when
I tried to mount it rw, but I was able to mount it ro and copy most of
the data) Note, that I wasn't able to copy about 10GB out of 30GB. So
don't ignore them and have a good luck.

> Has anyone who has experienced this pain found solace in 5-STABLE's ATA
> drivers?

> dmesg below.

-- 
Best regards

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