> Problem is now fully understood.
Nice! Hope you have, as I haven't completely, not yet being that
familiar with the deeper kind of lowlevel magic needed to program IDE
interfaces :)
> Some drives default with write-cache on, regardless.
> You can turn it off, and if the drive thinks it is stressing it will turn
> it back on because it determines that you really did not mean to turn it
> off.
>
> Even if you ask it in the WC is off, it will say yes (it is off)
> regradless that it turned itself back on. :-(
Not fully having understood the issue, I was careless and tried disabling the
write cache explicitly with "hdparm -W 0 /dev/hda", and ran the bonnie test
again.
At the first investigation it looks good, at least all the messages go away. But
there are still phases during write in which the system becomes totally locked
(not even the mouse cursor can be moved) for a few seconds. This time NOT
followed by the stated messages.
Re-Enabling write caching (with hdparm -W 1) caused all the messages to appear
again.
Hope that could support your ideas.
Can you tell me if it will be fixable in principle? Is the HD write-cache bad or
broken in general or just misimplemented?
Greetings,
Andreas
-- ->>>----------------------- Andreas Franck --------<<<- ---<<<---- Andreas.Franck@post.rwth-aachen.de --->>>--- ->>>---- Keep smiling! ----------------------------<<<-- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/