Re: ad0: FAILURE - WRITE_DMA

At 3:47 PM +1100 12/7/04, Christopher Vance wrote:
>I gave up with 5.3 on my SiI3512A with Seagate SATA disks because of
>this (mine was not only TIMEOUT, but also FAILURE) and related panics.
>
>OpenBSD current seems more stable on this hardware.  Pity really, as
>I've been using FreeBSD for years, and they're not quite so friendly
>over on the other side.
>
>My VIA SATA stuff still seems fine with 5.3, so I have to pick between
>a friendly OS (5.3), and one which can run VMware 4 (L*x).

I can sympathize.  I've been having WRITE_DMA problems, apparently
from a variety of causes.  At the moment my disk seems to be working
fine, but every time I think I can *trust* the disk, I start getting
another round of headaches.

About all I can do is guess at some possible problems.  What is the
capacity of the Seagate drive that you're having trouble with?  Are
you using vinum or gvinum on it?  Is your machine set up with a serial
console?  If the machine panics, can you get a core-dump of it, or do
you just get a disk error when it tries to write the dump to disk?

[disclaimer: I do not work at this level, so I wouldn't know what to
do to fix this.  I'm just saying that I know how frustrating these
WRITE_DMA errors can be...]

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad_at_gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad_at_freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih_at_rpi.edu