On Thursday July 6, pernegger@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > > > I suggest you find a SATA related mailing list to post this to (Look > > > in the MAINTAINERS file maybe) or post it to linux-kernel. > > linux-ide couldn't help much, aside from recommending a bleeding-edge > patchset which should fix a lot of things SATA: > http://home-tj.org/files/libata-tj-stable/ > > What fixed the error, though, was exchanging one of the cables. (Just > my luck, it was new and supposedly quality, ... oh well) > > I'm still interested in why the md code didn't fail the disk. While it > was 'up' any access to the array would hang for a long time, > ultimately fail and corrupt the fs to boot. When I failed the disk > manually everything was fine (if degraded) again. md is very dependant on the driver doing the right thing. It doesn't do any timeouts or anything like that - it assumes the driver will. md simply trusts the return status from the drive, and fails a drive if and only if a write to the drive is reported as failing (if a read fails, md trys to over-write with good data first). I don't know exactly how the driver was responding to the bad cable, but it clearly wasn't returning an error, so md didn't fail it. NeilBrown - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
