Fatal TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA errors return with ATA Mk.III

Paul Mather paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu
Sun Apr 24 08:58:36 PDT 2005


On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 11:08 +0200, Søren Schmidt wrote:
> Paul Mather wrote:
> > Since somewhere in the 5.x release cycle, my system has fallen prey to
> > the "TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA" errors which result in the drive becoming
> > detached (which causes my geom_mirror to break and require rebuilding).
> > According to smartctl and disk diagnostics, there's nothing wrong with
> > my drives.  Plus, the problem does not manifest itself under 4-STABLE.
> > (I'm not the only one to have reported this problem.)
> > 
> > Lately, I'd had success using a patch posted to freebsd-current by Ian
> > Dowse.  The "TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA" errors still occurred, but they
> > weren't fatal.  I updated my kernel and world recently, and, alas, the
> > "TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA" problem has returned once more:
> 
> You should try a recent -current, I committed cleanups to the timeout 
> system on the 21'st. You might still have timeouts (which might due to 
> non-ATA issues) but they should not be fatal unless the HW really does 
> screw up..

Many thanks!  I'll try an upgrade and see if that fixes things.

Cheers,

Paul.
-- 
e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

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