Re: Corruption Stats: Suggested Blacklist from the data

Rik van Riel (H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl)
Thu, 30 Jul 1998 19:44:07 +0200 (CEST)

On Thu, 30 Jul 1998, Joel D. Elkins wrote:
> Linus wrote:
> >>And now that I started thinking about it, I also remembered that tar
> >>sometimes fails to unpack otherwise good gzipped tarballs (if I repeat the
> >>command, everything is (usually) swell).
> >
> >But the above does sound very strange indeed. It's not necessarily the disk,
> >it could be memory or something else (the fact that it succeeds the second
> >time in fact implies that the image on the disk is fine, and that the
> >potential corruption happened somewhere else).
>
> If I remember the original post, he has a SCSI Quantum Fireball on which he was
> seeing these strange corruption problems. I can report very similar problems

I've seen errors like these too. Using scsi-setup to carefully
twiddle the mode pages of my SCSI devices cured this.

For IDE, using hdparm to set a more safe/conservative mode works
too. I don't disable DMA, but I use no multcount or do some other
'marginal' thing. Most things like this are, IMHO, solved by
seemingly irrelevant things and not the 'main suspects'...

Ingo, Mark, Linus: would this indicate a 'marginal/irrelevant'
kernel bug too? (ie. are we looking in the wrong place with
DMA or SMP and is timing or bookkeeping the problem; it would
be very frustrating to completely rewrite the DMA code when some
IDE timings table contains a typo)

Rik.
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Linux memory management tour guide. H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl |
| Scouting Vries cubscout leader. http://www.phys.uu.nl/~riel/ |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html