5.3-RELEASE: WARNING - WRITE_DMA interrupt timout - what does it mean?

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 7:58 PM -0800 11/9/04, Zoltan Frombach wrote:
>Well, since I posted my original message, I investigated
>this a bit further. And according to this post 
>http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-May/027235.html
>this is not necessarily an indication of a failing hard
>drive... (Quote: "there is no harm done, but the taskqueue
>was slow to respond...") And I can also tell you that this
>very same hard drive *never* produced this error message in
>the past 6 months while running FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT (from
>May 9, 2004).

Fwiw, I am also seeing this warning/error message on a brand new
machine with a brand new SATA hard disk in it.  I have seen the
message on multiple installs into different partitions on the same
hard drive.  I turned off some sysctl (hw.ata.ata_dma, *I think*)
to see if that would avoid the problem, but it did not seem to.

I usually do not notice any problem at the same time as the message,
but I have seen a few buildworlds which just happened to abort at
the same second this warning message appeared in /var/log/message.
So, I am not sure the message is benign in all circumstances.

I'm a bit busy with a variety of other issues right now, but I
should have some time this coming weekend to run any tests or
patches that might help to pin this down.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu