ad0 READ_DMA TIMEOUT errors on install of 7.0-RELEASE

[Chris]

On 28/02/2008, Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 02:47:28PM +0000, Chris wrote:
> > Did they push ahead with release because waiting for the mia dev?
>
> There's a lot of things that go into deciding when to release.  The
> release cycle this time was not supposed to be as long as it was.
> We kept finding showstoppers and needing to go back and fix them
> (especially for things like TCP performance and stability).
>
> However, sooner or later you do have to release something.  There are
> bugs in every software program ever released.
>
> It seems that in certain cases (we're not sure exactly which) the ata
> subsystem has regressed.  There's debate on the lists about exactly
> how common this is: with bugmeister hat on, I don't think it's as
> common as some folks seem to think it is (otherwise we would be overwhelmed
> with bug reports).
>
> There's a lot of badly-written firmware out there, and a lot of workarounds
> for it in the current ata stack.  I'm not familiar with the code, but
> fixing all this is a totally non-trivial task.
>
> Of course it would be nice to have several committers with sufficient
> variety of boards, and time, and experience to do a lot more QA, but
> we're a volunteer project and have to go with what we have in some cases.
>
> I'm open to suggestions about how we can get more people involved in
> QAing ata.
>
> mcl
>

Well I have now 3 servers running freebsd 7 and one is showing the dma
errors, a friend of mine has another 2 servers they both dont have dma
errors.  So the problem doesnt seem to be frequent but is a serious
problem when it does occur assuming I am affected by the problem as my
problem could be hardware related..

Chris