ATA + DMA still giving repeatable freezes
Robert Watson
rwatson at freebsd.org
Tue Jan 6 11:47:56 PST 2004
On Wed, 24 Dec 2003, Kirk Strauser wrote:
> At 2003-12-20T00:17:00Z, Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org> writes:
>
> > FYI, I had this problem on a notebook and foudn that disabling "device
> > apic" made things clear up. Try it and see if it helps, and if it does,
> > post as much. I'm busy testing to make sure my observation is right on my
> > system. I also saw fairly frequent hangs starting or leaving XWindows,
> > and John Baldwin hypothesized there was an interaction between DRM and the
> > interrupt code.
>
> Robert, I wanted to get in some more testing before reporting back. I
> cvsup'ed again and built world and kernel. This time, I started with
> plain GENERIC and made minor changes until I could reproduce the hangs.
> Basically, commenting out "options WITNESS" and "options
> WITNESS_SKIPSPIN" was enough to trigger the problem; I'm guessing that
> these options slow down the system enough that timing issues disappear.
>
> After adding this to my /boot/loader.conf.local:
>
> hw.ata.ata_dma="0"
> hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"
>
> I no longer get system hangs, although I do get these messages at random
> intervals during heavy ATA IO:
>
> ad0: TIMEOUT - READ_MUL retrying (2 retries left)
> ata0: resetting devices ..
> done
Not sure if you misread, but it looks like you're disabling ACPI rather
than apic (confusing, eh? :-). I'm currently in a situation on my Dell
Notebook where leaving the new ACPI enable but "device apic" disabled
seems to get me to full functionality. I discovered a BIOS upgrade on the
Dell web site, and need to try installing that to see if it helps. I also
haven't tried plugging and playing DRI as yet.
Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research
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