READ_DMA, WRITE_DMA errors

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Steve wrote:

> I've found tons of emails, news messages, listserv messages, and even 
> some bug reports of this seemingly common error.
>
> So, I had been running 5.2 on a server, and, updated to 5.3. Got the 
> READ_DMA and WRITE_DMA error and retries. So, figuring it might be a bad 
> update, took a new drive. put it in, loaded 5.4 for grins, and, same 
> issue, lots of these errors, eventually destroying the FS. Played around 
> with various settings, no avail. So, took it back, got different box, 
> everything new. Same problem, new install of 5.4

6.0 contains a significant re-write and update of the ATA driver, and 
corrects a number of known problems with timeouts and reliability.  This 
rewrite is available as patches against 5.x, but has not been committed 
because ATA is a very sensitive thing (lots of very diverse and very 
broken hardware), and has had insufficient testing.  If you have test 
hardware available that's not in production, it would be quite helpful if 
you could install 6.0-BETA2, once that comes out in the next week or so, 
and see if the specific ATA problems you're experiencing occur there. 
It's not impossible that the new ATA code will be merged to 5.x, but I 
think we cannot do that until it has seen a lot more exposure.  If you 
search back through the mailing archives, you should be able to find posts 
from Soren regarding the new ATA patches, if you want to give them a try 
on 5.x.

Robert N M Watson