I've been monitoring the linux-ide list to try and find a solution to my problem with my intel box (i965) and SATA disks.. I sent a mail to the maintainer of the ata_piix driver and cc'd the linux-ide ML, but go no responses. I'm not used to mail to ML's, so please excuse me if I did something wrong with the reply of this mail/CC'ing the wrong persons etc. :) Here's what I wrote in my last mail to linux-ide: I've got some big performance related problem with my Abit AB9 pro mobo, the ICH8 controller and my SATA disks.. I've got 2 64GB WD raptor disks in a raid0(These are the disks I have used dd/hdparm on in the commands below), and a 2x250GB WD disk raid0, and I used to get around 130-140mb/sec seq write with them, but now with my new mobo I'm lucky if I get 10mb/sec. During heavy disk activity the system locks up, until the write is completed (Ie, no other read or write is being made, it's like heavy IO completely starves all other processes until it's finished).. Running 2.6.19-rc5-mm2 atm, but I've tried a few diffrent kernels, same thing. Also, it doesn't matter if I enable AHCI in the BIOS (But with AHCI enabled the disks spin down/power down when I boot, just to power up again a few seconds after. The boot progress freezes until the disks have spun up again. (This happens when the kernel probes the sata controller ports at bootup, the disks spin down at the same time, but spin up one by one as they're getting probed)) I've tried changing I/O scheduler, only noticable diffrence is when I use "noop". Then I get like 20mb/sec write instead of 4mb/sec. I have no idea why this is :P Example of what I mean with crappy performance: dd if=/dev/zero of=test232 bs=1M count=100; time sync 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 0.130424 s, 804 MB/s real 0m21.104s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.011s 21 seconds to do a seq write of 100mb.. And during this time ALL other disk IO gets starved, I can't do anything that uses disk IO for the duration.. (not even `ls`) Yet, a hdparm shows a decent read hdparm -tT /dev/md4 /dev/md4: Timing cached reads: 8060 MB in 1.99 seconds = 4042.19 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 400 MB in 3.00 seconds = 133.28 MB/sec dd if=1GBzeroFile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 11.4335 s, 91.7 MB/s This is the cpu usage stats I get from top when running the dd write: Cpu0 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 99.0%wa, 0.5%hi, 0.5%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Pretty crappy read speeds compared to what I got on my previous mobo (around 140mb/sec), but still alot better than the 4mb/sec I get when writing.. I've also googled this for many hours, I've searched the lkml, checked the gentoo forums, as well as other distro forums, I just don't know what else to do. I'll appreciate any help or hints I can get. Dmesg output from the error(s): (sda and sdb are 2 * 74GB raptor SATA drives in a Linux software raid0) ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen ata1.00: (BMDMA stat 0x20) ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xca Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout) ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs) ata1: soft resetting port ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd 0xec) ata1.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x4) ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5) ata1: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs ata1: soft resetting port ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100 ata1: EH complete SCSI device sda: 145226112 512-byte hdwr sectors (74356 MB) sda: Write Protect is off sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen ata1.00: (BMDMA stat 0x21) ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xc8 Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout) ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs) ata1: soft resetting port ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100 ata1: EH complete SCSI device sda: 145226112 512-byte hdwr sectors (74356 MB) sda: Write Protect is off sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen ata1.00: (BMDMA stat 0x21) ata1.00: tag 0 cmd 0xc8 Emask 0x4 stat 0x40 err 0x0 (timeout) ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs) ata1: soft resetting port ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ATA: abnormal status 0xD0 on port 0xFA07 ata1.00: failed to IDENTIFY (I/O error, err_mask=0x2) ata1.00: revalidation failed (errno=-5) ata1: failed to recover some devices, retrying in 5 secs ata1: soft resetting port ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100 ata1: EH complete SCSI device sda: 145226112 512-byte hdwr sectors (74356 MB) sda: Write Protect is off sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back Most of the time when I get these errors the system will recover after anything from 10 seconds to 10 minutes of unresponsiveness (no disk I/O), and sometimes hang. IF the system does recover, I start getting the extremly low disk write speeds that I reported above, and only a reboot will get the performance back to regular. I don't know what causes it, but most of the times when I've gotten it my system has been under heavy load (compiling, downloading torrents in 11mb/sec etc). Please let me know if you want any additional info, want me to try something out, or whatever. My recent hardware upgrade for around $1200 (to a core2duo system, i965 mobo) is just going to waste because of this problem. :/ I just got so glad when I saw the post of this on linux-ide, I've been searching like crazy to find another person having the same problem (and possibly a solution) for the past 2-3 weeks or so. -- -Jonas Name: Jonas Lundgren ICQ#: 52064961 IRC: neon / neonman @ EFnet, Undernet, Quakenet, freenode - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
