Hello,
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 03:23:13PM +1100, Steven Haigh wrote:
> I might have acted a bit prematurely on this. After booting off the
> CentOS 5.5 installation DVD, I noticed that the esata drive at the
> same problem. After lots of cable swapping and testing, I have found
> that the esata cable may be faulty as a direct SATA -> drive
> connection works perfectly.
>
> I am unsure however why my previous test of plugging the esata drive
> directly to the onboard SATA controller worked - however now this
> also fails.
>
> I shall attempt to try some different eSATA cables and report back
> if I manage to isolate the issue directly to the sata_sil module.
It's probably dependent on timing and not completely reliable. It's
rather complicated. The AC_ERR_NODEV_HINT thing is there primarily
for PATA controllers so that they don't spend time trying to probe
empty ports.
Does the following patch resolve the problem?
diff --git a/drivers/ata/libata-core.c b/drivers/ata/libata-core.c
index d4e52e2..d08383f 100644
--- a/drivers/ata/libata-core.c
+++ b/drivers/ata/libata-core.c
@@ -1908,7 +1908,13 @@ retry:
err_mask = ata_do_dev_read_id(dev, &tf, id);
if (err_mask) {
- if (err_mask & AC_ERR_NODEV_HINT) {
+ /*
+ * AC_ERR_NODEV_HINT is primarily used to detect empty PATA
+ * ports. Some SATA devices incorrectly trigger it.
+ * Ignore if the physical link is positively online.
+ */
+ if ((err_mask & AC_ERR_NODEV_HINT) &&
+ !ata_phys_link_online(ata_dev_phys_link(dev))) {
ata_dev_printk(dev, KERN_DEBUG,
"NODEV after polling detection\n");
return -ENOENT;
--
tejun
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