Tejun Heo wrote:
None of the drives I have follows what the standard says about transfer chunk size. Of the four SATA and six PATA ATAPI devices tested, four ignore transfer chunk size completely and the ones which honor it don't behave according to the spec when it's odd. According to the spec, transfer chunk size can be odd if the amount of data to transfer equals or is smaller than the chunk size and the device can indicate the same odd number and transfer the whole thing at one go with a pad byte appended. However, in reality, none of the drives I have does that. They all indicate and transfer even number of bytes one byte shorter than the chunk size first; then indicate and transfer two bytes, which is clearly out of spec. In addition to unnecessary second PIO data phase, this also creates a weird problem when combined with SATA controllers which perform PIO via DMA. Some of these controllers use actualy number of bytes received to update DMA pointer so chunks which are sized 4n + 2 makes DMA pointer off by two bytes. This causes data corruption and buffer overruns. This patch rounds nbytes up to the nearest even number such that ATAPI devices don't split data transfer for the last odd byte. This shouldn't confuse controllers which depend on transfer chunk size as devices will report the rounded-up number, actually transfer that much and padding buffer is there to receive them. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <htejun@xxxxxxxxx>
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