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DMA issues, drives randomly disabling DMA mode
  • xtremeqgxtremeqg December 2009
    Greetings, I have been trying to install slitaz onto my computer for the last couple days but I ran into some problems which I cannot resolve myself.

    The situation is as follows: I have the liveCD version booting just fine from an XD card inside my camera (which is doubling as a card reader) as I dont have any usb thumb drives laying around. I have 8 hard drives of various sizes on multiple controllers and I wish to tie together using LVM ontop of software raid 5. I ran a couple simulations in VMWare to be sure that this setup would work and I did not encounter any showstopping problems.

    However now that I am actually building the raid arrays, I am running into many problems. Just building the first array (~80 GB in size) took about 2 hours at a very very slow speed of about 8MB/s. Raising the min and max limits had no effect whatsoever, nor could I find any reason for it being so slow on my hardware. While trying to diagnose the problem, I found numerous errors and warnings in dmesg about interrupts being lost and DMA mode being disabled at random:

    --- body too long, continuing below ---
  • xtremeqgxtremeqg December 2009
    hdb: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x60
    hdb: DMA timeout retry
    hdb: timeout waiting for DMA
    hda: dma_timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
    hda: DMA timeout error
    hda: dma timeout error: status=0x50 { DriveReady SeekComplete }
    ide: failed opcode was: unknown
    hdb: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
    ide: failed opcode was: unknown
    hdb: drive not ready for command
    Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = 4686797829 ns)
    ide0: reset: success
    hdh: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
    hdh dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatus Error BadCRC }
    ide: failed opcode was: unknown
    -- last 3 lines repeated 4 times --
    hdg: DMA disabled
    hdh: UDMA/100 mode selected
    ide3: reset: success

    hdb: lost interrupt
    hdb: lost interrupt
    hdb: lost interrupt
    hdb: lost interrupt
    ide-cd: cmd 0x1e timed out
    hdc: lost interrupt
    -- repeated 30 or so times --

    At first I thought it was because some of these drives are quite old, however when I ran dd if=/dev/zero of=/test/somefile bs=1048576 count=1024 the following errors popped up in dmesg:

    hdf: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
    hdf: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatus Error BadCRC }
    ide: failed opcode was: unknown
    -- last 3 above repeated 4 times --
    hde: DMA disabled
    hdf: UDMA/100 mode selected
    ide2: reset: success

    I dont understand why drives have their DMA modes disabled when they are not in use (not mounted, nor part of array). Nor why interrups and DMA errors are occurring accross 8 different drives on 2 different controllers. Anyone have any suggestions?

    Forum ate my formatting, apologies.
  • xtremeqgxtremeqg December 2009
    Apparently nobody cares... In any case, this is not a hardware problem. I downloaded the Fedora 12 64-bit LiveCD. After having some initial problems (I/O buffer errors on sd0, solved by using disk-at-once burn method) I am now happily building my arrays at a more comfortable 20MB/s without errors or ever having touched my hardware. I will continue using Slitaz in VMs however, the extremely low memory and disk footprint of your distribution is quite nice.
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