[Gambas-user] We live a dangerous life sometimes...

[Rolf-Werner Eilert]

Am 26.05.2011 22:41, schrieb Benoît Minisini:
>> Sometimes bad power cable connection does things like that, but maybe
>> Benoit has already check those.
>>
>> Jussi
>>
>
> I come back, with a new firmware.
>
> I have two SATA hard disks. The first one is the original one, and I had no
> freeze with it. The second one, the WD Velociraptor, was added after. When I
> got the freezes, I swapped the two cables, but it changed nothing.
>
> Concretely, the drive stops between 1 and 2 mn each hour, making the system
> unusable until it wakes up. Only the mouse and processes doing no disk access
> work. Sometimes I have no freeze at all during a long time.
>
> For the SMART utility, there is no problem at all on the disk.
>
> I noticed that running Firefox help having the freezes. So I suspected the
> kernel part of the nouveau driver. But I use the NVIDIA blob since a few days,
> and I got the freezes too. They are just shorter (?)
>
> Then I found on the web someone that created a bootable CD with Windows 98
> that updates the firwares of my model (WD1500HLFS). On the web page, some
> comments of a guy that describes the same problem as mine telling that the
> update fixed it! So...
>
> Now, let's see if I will continue having freezes...
>


Arrgh - if I had seen that earlier, I might have warned you it could be 
futile.

Currently, there is a discussion between the kernel guys going on about 
this, it is due to a kernel module which was changed to make it fit for 
a special controller but it had this "side effect" on other controllers.

I stumbled across this because I had the same problem on my laptop. In 
the Linux forum I use, someone pointed me to it as a possible solution.

I used iotop to find the source of the writing activity, but to no 
avail. But tail -f /var/log/messages shows errors on SATA each time the 
system comes back. First I thought of the hardware, but that guy pointed 
me to this discussion:

One Posting says that "device reported invalid CHS sector 0" could come 
from a kernel bug:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/397096

The line: "device reported invalid CHS sector 0", seems to be an "off by 
one error" reported in
http://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/41773/ and fixed upstream, and not 
seen often "The bug isn't very visible because ata_tf_read_block() is 
used only when generating sense data for a failed RW command and CHS 
addressing isn't used too often these days.", Tejun Heo says.

Then he said the problem might be in

/usr/src/linux-2.6.37.6-0.5/drivers/ata/ahci.c

which doesn't help me too much ;-)

And he gives this URL

http://help.lockergnome.com/linux/AHCI-driver-problem-SB700-SB800-Acer-Ferrari--ftopict537147.html

Now, what do you think? Could this be your problem, too? If so, I guess 
we just have to wait for the next kernel update from the repos?

Regards

Rolf