lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2005]   [Nov]   [19]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: Laptop mode causing writes to wrong sectors?
On Sat, Nov 19, 2005 at 09:39:15AM +0100, Bart Samwel wrote:
> Pavel Machek wrote:
> >>My laptop also has a spindown (five min from memory) and I have yet to
> >>have a problem with it. Don't know if any of that is "spindowns without
> >>laptopmode" in a useful sense.
> >
> >Unless you can also reproduce the failure... no, probably does not help
> >much.
>
> Okay, let's recap.
>
> * There are a lot of people who are not having problems. The people who
> *are* having problems can usually reproduce them. My interpretation: the
> problem is triggered by some hardware and/or kernel config settings.
>
> * A significant proportion of the people who *do* have trouble see
> messages about DMA timeouts. The problems do also occur on other
> hardware, but seem to be most pronounced on Thinkpad T40s. On those
> machines, the DMA timeout problems are triggered *especially* when the
> madwifi drivers are loaded (see
> http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6108).
>
> Perhaps I should start collection kernel configs and hardware specs, see
> if there are any unexpected commonalities. The influence of the madwifi
> drivers suggest that we could be be looking for anything really. What do
> you think?

The issue might be that these people are using

hdparm -S xxx

or

hdparm -y / -Y

while a much better way to do

hdparm -B 63

The -S option should in theory be safe, but I remember some drives did
behave unpredictably if this was used. -y/-Y is much tougher and some
drives will not work reliably unless first woken up manually before
issuing a read/write request.

On the other hand, -B is pretty safe on drives that support it, and all
IBM notebook drives do.

--
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs, SuSE CR
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-11-19 10:33    [W:0.110 / U:0.140 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site