On Mon, 2015-08-03 at 11:55 -0400, Tejun Heo wrote: > Hello, James. > > On Mon, Aug 03, 2015 at 08:42:43AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote: > > I'd think it would be the same reason as all modern transports: it's > > faster and allows processing of sense data in-band. Under the old > > regime, the device is effectively frozen until you collect the data. > > Under autosense, the data is collected as part of the in-band command > > processing, so it doesn't stall the device. > > > > Modern drives (and protocols) are moving towards being somewhat more > > chatty with sense data. It doesn't just signal an error, mostly it's > > just reporting about drive characteristics or other advisory stuff. > > This means that if you handle it the old way, you'll get more drive > > stalls and a corresponding reduction in throughput. > > The problem is not the "auto" part but the "sense" part, I guess. ATA > devices (the harddisks) never reported sense data and instead had a > more rudimentary error bits and for newer devices NCQ log pages, so > libata EH decodes those error information and takes appropriate > actions for the indicated error condition. > > Hannes's patchset makes ATA devices mostly bypass libata EH when sense > data is present. For, say, unrecoverable read errors, it'd be > possible to make this scheme work (broken currently tho); however, > libata and SCSI aren't that closely tied and there currently is no way > for SCSI to tell libata that, e.g., link error was detected on the > device side, so libata will fail to take link recovery actions on > those cases. > > This *can* be made to work in a couple different ways but what's > implemented now is pretty broken and making it work properly in any > other way than integrating sense decoding into libata EH would require > major restructuring of the whole thing which I'm not sure would be > worthwhile at this point. I'm not arguing that *this* patch is the best way to do it. You asked *why* autosense and that's what I answered. I think there's time to work out the implementation details to get them to be correct and well structured. James -- 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
