Promise SATA timeout problems (PR 103435)

Rich Wales richw at richw.org
Mon Oct 2 06:58:23 UTC 2006


I'm experiencing a problem that seems to be the one reported in:

   http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=103435&cat=i386

I've got a Promise SATA300 TX4 card (note, this is =not= a RAID
card) and two Seagate 300GB SATA drives, in an old (800-MHz
original "Slot A" Athlon) experimental box currently running
6.1-RELEASE-p9.

If I generate a heavy I/O load on the disks, I start getting a
bunch of timeout messages -- various "taskqueue timeout"s, READ_DMA
and READ_DMA48 retries, and even an occasional UDMA ICRC error.

I can produce this stuff pretty reliably by starting up two "dd"
commands -- copying each drive to /dev/null -- and running them
concurrently.

As best I can tell from searching on the net, this problem has been
around for quite some time, in both FreeBSD and Linux systems, and
no one seems to have managed to figure out what's causing it.

Needless to say, I'd love to see a fix.  Any ideas?

Rich Wales
Palo Alto, CA, USA
richw at richw.org
http://www.richw.org


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