Re: [PATCH][RFC] ServerWorks autodma behavior

[Andre Hedrick]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Alan Cox wrote:

> > I have a lot of ServerWorks OSB4 IDE hardware, which has the annoyingly
> > suboptimal behavior of corrupting filesystems when DMA is active.
> 
> With newer kernels you should get a panic because we spot the "I'm going
> to get 4 bytes stuck in the FIFO and DMA your inodes shifted 4 bytes down the
> disk behaviour" - at least in the cases I could study
> 
> What set up do you have ?
> 
> > Unfortunately, serverworks.c (in recent 2.4, at least) does not honor
> > the CONFIG_IDEDMA_AUTO config option -- it turns dma on only unless
> > "ide=nodma" is set on the kernel command line.
> 
> You actually really to just turn off UDMA from experience.
> 
> >  	if (hwif->dma_base) {
> > +#ifdef CONFIG_IDEDMA_AUTO
> >  		if (!noautodma)
> >  			hwif->autodma = 1;
> > +#endif
> 
> I would have expected this to be a fix in the core code to ignore
> hwif->autodma but I'll admit I've not looked to see if that is practical.

It is not practical and it was absorbed via distos which are/were
generally paranoid of DMA because of the total number of ATAPI devices
that live in SFF-8020/8070 but claim ATA/ATAPI-4 so who knows or cares.

The real solution for distros is to wrapper the dma_capable flags in the
module cores in 2.4 under the disk_only.  Also not setting
CONFIG_IDEDMA_AUTO will help but you are not permitted to invoke

echo using_dma:1 > /proc/ide/hda/settings

One of the issues to be address is a test for transfer modes, but have to
many other issues to address w/ clients to deal with distro issues.

Cheers,

Andre Hedrick
Linux Disk Certification Project                Linux ATA Development