[Bug 84603] Hard disk I/O randomly freezes when hald is running and optical drive is empty

Keenan Pepper keenanpepper at gmail.com
Sun Feb 11 21:00:37 UTC 2007


Public bug reported:

Binary package hint: hal

When I upgraded the kernel on my System76 Gazelle (basically a ASUS
Z62FP without the Microsoft tax) from 2.6.17 to 2.6.20, the hard disk
began freezing for 30 seconds every few minutes whenever the CD/DVD
drive was empty. When there is a disk in the optical drive, the freezes
occur much less often, but I'm sure there's been at least one even with
a CD in.

The relevant part of the dmesg is:

[  188.960000] ata1.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x2 frozen
[  188.960000] ata1.01: cmd a0/00:00:00:00:20/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0 
[  188.960000]          res 40/00:03:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
[  195.964000] ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient (Status 0xd0)
[  218.980000] ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs, Status 0xd0)
[  218.980000] ata1: soft resetting port
[  219.332000] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
[  219.516000] ata1.01: configured for UDMA/33
[  219.516000] ata1: EH complete
[  219.532000] SCSI device sda: 78140160 512-byte hdwr sectors (40008 MB)
[  219.540000] sda: Write Protect is off
[  219.540000] sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[  219.900000] SCSI device sda: write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[  219.904000] SCSI device sda: 78140160 512-byte hdwr sectors (40008 MB)
[  219.904000] sda: Write Protect is off
[  219.904000] sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[  219.908000] SCSI device sda: write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

I'm filing this bug against HAL because kernel developer Tejun Heo says
HAL is poking the CD/DVD drive and confusing it, and indeed when I kill
hald the problem goes away. On the other hand, I only noticed the
problem after upgrading the kernel, and when I force the old ide_generic
driver to be used by blacklisting ata_piix, the problem also goes away,
so maybe it should be filed against the kernel package instead.

dmesg and lspci -vvx attached

** Affects: hal (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: Unconfirmed

-- 
Hard disk I/O randomly freezes when hald is running and optical drive is empty
https://launchpad.net/bugs/84603




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