Sorry for the late follow up to this thread, but I'm also seeing symptoms that look identical to these and would be grateful for any advice. I think I can reasonably rule out a single faulty drive, controller or cabling set as I'm seeing it across a cluster of Supermicro machines with six Seagate ST3750523AS SATA drives in each and the drive that times out is apparently randomly distributed across the cluster. (Of course, since the hardware is identical, it could still be a hardware design or firmware problem.) We're running x86-64 2.6.30.5 (and previously 2.6.30.4 where we also saw the problem) with these drives on top of an on-motherboard ahci controller: ahci 0000:00:1f.2: version 3.0 alloc irq_desc for 19 on cpu 0 node 0 alloc kstat_irqs on cpu 0 node 0 ahci 0000:00:1f.2: PCI INT B -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0100 32 slots 6 ports 3 Gbps 0x3f impl RAID mode ahci 0000:00:1f.2: flags: 64bit ncq pm led pmp slum part ahci 0000:00:1f.2: setting latency timer to 64 scsi0 : ahci scsi1 : ahci scsi2 : ahci scsi3 : ahci scsi4 : ahci scsi5 : ahci ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m1024@0xd8500400 port 0xd8500500 irq 19 ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 irq_stat 0x00400040, connection status changed irq 19 ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 irq 19 ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 irq_stat 0x00400040, connection status changed ata5: SATA max UDMA/133 irq_stat 0x00400040, connection status changed ata6: SATA max UDMA/133 irq_stat 0x00400040, connection status changed [...] ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) ata1.00: ATA-8: ST3750523AS, CC34, max UDMA/133 ata1.00: 1465149168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32) ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA ST3750523AS CC34 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1465149168 512-byte hardware sectors: (750 GB/698 GiB) sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA sda:<5>sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0 sda1 sda2 sda3 sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk [etc] These machines host large numbers of kvm virtual machines and have three RAID arrays, a RAID1 of /dev/sd[abcdef]1 for /, a RAID10 of /dev/sd[abcdef]2 for swap and a large RAID10 of /dev/sd[abcdef]3 which is used as an LVM2 PV, out of which the virtual drives are carved. Everything will be running fine when suddenly: ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen ata1.00: cmd ea/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0 res 40/00:00:80:17:91/00:00:37:00:00/40 Emask 0x4 (timeout) ata1.00: status: { DRDY } ata1: hard resetting link ata1: softreset failed (device not ready) ata1: hard resetting link ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 ata1: EH complete end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 1465147272 md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0 raid10: Disk failure on sda3, disabling device. raid10: Operation continuing on 5 devices. The drive shows no errors in the SMART log, it doesn't really have any read or write problems at 1465147272 (verified with O_DIRECT dd), and the reallocated sector count is still zero. mdadm --remove and mdadm --add on the component bring everything back to life fine. I'm using the deadline IO scheduler with default 5s timeout value for these disks, in case that could be part of the problem? LVM2 does O_DIRECT reads and writes to the md array to manipulate its metadata, and my virtual machines are doing quite a lot of IO to the logical volumes too, which they open O_SYNC, so the arrays are reasonably heavily loaded. I think there are two things that concern me here. One is obviously that the timeouts and resets are happening at all and I'd like to get to the bottom of this. However, the other is that the response to a SCSI disk having to be reset is to chuck it out of the array even though it'll be fine following the reset! I'd very much like to stop this happening somehow. A couple of other problems I'm seeing, which may be connected, and make this problem more painful... Perhaps it's inevitable because of the IO load the machine is under, but I find I need to set /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min right down to 0 before any resync or all disk accesses seem to deadlock completely, including the RAID resync itself. In this state, all attempts to dd even a single block from /dev/md2 will hang forever. With the speed limit minimum reduced to 0, resync proceeds fine most of the time, occasionally dropping down to zero speed when other IO is going on (which is fine), but apparently not deadlocking. I have a bitmap on the array, but sometimes when I remove and re-add a failed component, it doesn't seem to use the bitmap and does a lengthy full recovery instead. One example that's ongoing at the moment:- [=>...................] recovery = 5.7% (40219648/703205312) finish=7546.3min speed=1463K/sec bitmap: 34/126 pages [136KB], 8192KB chunk which is rather painful and has to be throttled back with speed_limit_max to avoid the virtual machines running on top of it from having extremely poor IO latency. Best wishes, Chris. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html