*BSD News Article 59229


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From: geert@fozzie.sun3.iaf.nl (Geert Bosch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: SCSI-2 Bus Hangs
Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Date: 10 Jan 1996 14:21:17 +0100
Organization: La Calandre Infortunee
Lines: 34
Message-ID: <4d0egd$hft@fozzie.sun3.iaf.nl>
References: <4bju5p$ihj@wilma.widomaker.com> <4bp3bp$7cc@scratchy.mosquito.com> <1995Dec26.123518.1@spcvxb.spc.edu> <4brb07$b4q@uriah.heep.sax.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: fozzie.sun3.iaf.nl
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]

J Wunsch (j@uriah.heep.sax.de) wrote about how hard it is to find
a good time-out value for a device or bus-reset and how harmful it
is to reset too early.

I'd like to know if FreeBSD does reset the bus eventually, and after
what time-out period. I've got a SCSI-drive for example that has mechanical
problems the first two weeks after it's been turned on. Since I had a Sun 3/60
with a nearly full disk, I decided to put the drive in and try.

The messages when the drive fails look like this:

Jan  5 02:01:37 fozzie vmunix: sd2:  rezero failed
Jan  5 02:01:40 fozzie vmunix: sd2a:  write retry, block 98464 (98464 relative)
Jan  5 02:01:40 fozzie vmunix: sd2a error:  sense key(0x4): hardware error, erro
r code(0x3): write fault

SunOS tries rewriting the block for about a quarter of an hour, sometimes pauses
a minute or two, then resets the drive and after an hour resets the bus. 
But it never gives up and finally (after 1 - 70 minutes) gets the data through. 
No data has ever been lost and I never needed a reboot. I've used the drive 
for a year and compiled many, many megabytes of source-code with it, including 
several full-builds of X11R6. BTW. I also formatted a large harddisk which
about an hour to complete, but in that case the bus was not reset.

On my PC (then running OS/2 and Linux) I would get lots of filesystem errors
when using the drive. Would FreeBSD have the same attitude towards partially
failing drives as SunOS? (Try, retry and retry again until you succeed or
some really long period has elapsed.)

Greetings,
   Geert
-- 
E-Mail: geert@sun3.iaf.nl 
 Phone: +31-53-4303054