Hi, I am seeing a problem with libata and the sata_sil driver. I was redirected here from the lkml so I hope it's the correct list for this. I am running a 2.6.21 SMP mips kernel and on some occasions the kernel halts on startup. This only happens at boot time, that is, once the system is running it never exhibits the problem. The problem occurs when trying to read the partitions from the SATA drive, on the first call to read_dev_sector(). As I understand it, the code finishes doing a sync_page() which starts an asynchronous I/O operation and sleeps until awaken by an interrupt generated by the SATA device. I have followed the code through until the call to ata_bmdma_start(), where it does: iowrite8(dmactl | ATA_DMA_START, ap->ioaddr.bmdma_addr + ATA_DMA_CMD); On a working case, the device interrupts and the flow continues. On a non working case, there is a delay of 5 or 6 seconds, and then a series of calls to sil_freeze(), ata_bmdma_error_handler() and ata_bmdma_stop(). I am about to delve into the ATA specs to try to understand this interaction, but has anybody seen this behavior before? Please CC me on replies. Regards, Alex -- 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
