5.3-RELEASE: WARNING - WRITE_DMA interrupt timout

[Søren Schmidt]

Zoltan Frombach wrote:
> This is still an issue for me. Please read this post of mine:
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2004-November/009420.html
> 
> Can anyone help? I would gladely install test patches to track this 
> problem down. My system is 5.3-R. And the WRITE_DMA warning happens at 
> least twice a day, it is so predictable. With thanks,

Hmmm, that warning is issued from ATA when requests has been returned to 
the systems bio_taskqueue but the system hasn't finished them within the 
timeout. Now this is an indication of the system being unresponsive 
already at that point, or at least that was the idea.
It has nothing to do with a bad drive, since the interrupt was seen the 
drive has finished the request it was asked, its the layers above ATA 
that doesn't respond to the request beeing returned as finished.

-Søren

> 
> Zoltan
> 
> Subject: Re: 5.3-RELEASE: WARNING - WRITE_DMA interrupt timout - what 
> does it mean?
> 
> 
>> 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 
> 
> 
> .