Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 19 Nov 2005 10:26:22 +0100 | From | Vojtech Pavlik <> | Subject | Re: Laptop mode causing writes to wrong sectors? |
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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/
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