Tejun Heo wrote:
Hello, Mark.
Mark Lord wrote:
Speaking of which.. these are all WRITEs.
In 18 years of IDE/ATA development,
I have *never* seen a hard disk drive report a WRITE error.
Which makes sense, if you think about it -- it's rewriting the sector
with new ECC info, so it *should* succeed. The only case where it won't,
is if the sector has been marked as "bad" internally, and the drive is
too dumb to try anyways after it runs out of remap space.
In which case we've already lost data, and taking more than a hundred
and twenty seconds isn't going to make a serious difference.
Yeah, the disk must be knee deep in shit to report WRITE failure. I
don't really expect the code to be exercised often but was mainly trying
fill the loophole in libata error handling as this type of behavior is
what the spec requires on FLUSH errors.
I didn't add global timeout because retries are done iff the drive is
reporting progress.
1. Drives genuinely deep in shit and getting lots of WRITE errors would
report different sectors on each FLUSH and we NEED to keep retrying.
That's what the spec requires and the FLUSH could be from shutdown and
if so that would be the drive's last chance to write data to the drive.
2. There are other issues causing the command to fail (e.g. timeout, HSM
violation or somesuch). This is the case EH can take a really long time
if it keeps retrying but the posted code doesn't retry if this is the case.
3. The drive is crazy and reporting errors for no good reason. Unless
the drive is really anti-social and raise such error condition only
after tens of seconds, this shouldn't take too long. Also, if LBA
doesn't change for each retry, the tries count is halved.
So, I think the code should be safe. Do you still think we need a
global timeout? It is easy to add. I'm just not sure whether we need
it or not.
..
With EH becoming more and more capable and complex,
a global deadline for FLUSH looks like a reasonable thing.
People who have no backups can leave it at the default "near-infinity" setting
that is there now, and folks with RAID1 (or better) can set it to a much
shorter number -- so that their system-recovery reboot doesn't take 3 hours
to get past the FLUSH_CACHE on the failing drive. :)
Cheers
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