READ_DMA, WRITE_DMA errors

[Steve]

Ok, I applied the ata mkiii patches onto my freebsd 5.4 on our least 
important machine that I was speaking of in my first email here, and, so 
far, for an hour, no read or write dma errors! Running udma now instead 
of pio4 which I had to use before. Massive speed difference of course.

This is the VT8237 VT6410 SATA Raid Controller (not using raid) found on 
the asus a7v880 MB.

So, count me in as saying the new ata mkiii patch is great! Looking 
forward to it even going into 5.5 if possible.

Steve

Robert Watson wrote:

>
> 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