Re: sata_nv issues with MCP51 SATA controller

[Jon Ivar Rykkelid <jonry@pvv.org>]

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Jon Ivar Rykkelid wrote:
> > Hi, I'm resending (didn't see my first attempt appear on the maillist):
> >
> >
> >
> > I'm having serious disk-issues when using the on-board nvidia controller
> > for my HDDs (My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-N650SLI-DS4 with nvidia
> > chipset, cpu is intel Core2Quad)
> >
> > excerpt from "lspci":
> > 00:0d.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 IDE (rev a1)
> > 00:0e.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Serial ATA Controller
> > (rev a1)
> > 00:0f.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP51 Serial ATA Controller
> > (rev a1)
> >
> > I have a normal IDE/P-ATA-disk attached to the "IDE"-controller and that
> > works fine (/dev/hda)
> >
> > However, any number of disks (I have tried 2 and 4) connected to the
> > SATA-controller(s), will eventually fail. - See attached log (excerpt /
> > anything relevant from /var/log/messages)
> >
> > At first, disks were REALLY unstable, but then I disabled S.M.A.R.T.
> > (both in BIOS and Linux), and I updated from the CentOS5 (equivalent of
> > RHEL5) kernel (2.6.18) to the latest (at that time) official kernel from
> > kernel.org:
> >
> >  > uname -a
> > Linux mirakel 2.6.22.5-custom_jir #2 SMP Thu Aug 30 22:06:21 CEST 2007
> > i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
> >
> > Now it will normally take a day or two before SATA crashes, so things
> > are better, but still rather useless.
> >
> > First error when sata_nv get into problems is always:
> > "exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen"
> > (as shown in the attached log-file.) - when this happens to one device,
> > it'll almost instantly happen to the other disk attached to that
> > controller as well. A couple of minutes (or so) later, the disk(s)
> > connected to the other controller will start acting up as well (in the
> > same manner). - I/O freezes, and nothing helps except a reboot...
> >
> > As I run a rather large (software / md) RAID-5 disk array on this server
> > (I'm doing a bit of video editing), every crash means a time-consuming
> > rebuild of the disk-array...
> >
> > I have given up on the sata_nv / nvidia-controllers for the time being.
> > I now resort to some old PCI-connected sata-controllers which work fine
> > (but slow, as they are outdated and "overloaded").
> >
> > So, if anyone has a good solution / suggestion / improved driver (over
> > the one supplied with the official 2.6.22.5-kernel) I am eager to give
> > it a go and see if the situation can be resolved.
>
> does adma=0 module option do anything?
>
>     Jeff
Thanks for the suggestion, but sata_nv is not built modular in my 
current kernel, so "no can do" at the moment
(However, if some expert REALLY thinks this will fix things, I will 
CERTAINLY recompile and give it a go)

As I said before, it all works for some time (a day or two) before it 
crashes with the current kernel & no "S.M.A.R.T.". With my current setup 
I have always had the time to fully rebuild my disk-array before a new 
crash. - In the case of 4 disks attached to the nvidia controllers 
(disregarding the disks on other controllers), this means that the 
sata_nv-driver / controllers alone have read at least 750GB and written 
250GB of data before the crash (with no resets working) - soft reboot 
fixes everything. -  I'm pretty confident that this is a driver issue.

As Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com> writes "the whole controller seems to 
have went down at once and it's not even IRQ routing problem - resets 
are failing."

The error-messages / crash-symptoms were the same with SMART enabled and 
the original CentOS5-kernel, except that with that setup, the crashes 
were much more frequent.

Any help?

BR
Jon Ivar

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