Comment 84 for bug 550559

I have this problem, but I have learned something new about it, the problem seems controller related during its interaction with a ext4 file systems using ncq. When I first had this problem, I assumed it was hardware so I bought a new disk and added it to my system and on a lark I reformatted and placed a btrfs file system on my old disk to try it out. When I did these things the problem seemed to stop with the original ATA ST3400830AS disk. Then one day I happened to be copying files from the new disk en-mass to my old one when I saw the error start happening again with my brand new disk a ATA ST910021AS. To be clear it seemed to have jumped from my original disk to the new disk. Here is what is I see. On my original disk I used btrfs on the second partition this or adding the new disk made the problem stop happening on this disk. On the new disk I used ext4 on the second partition that itself is in a extended partition where I am now getting this error. Clearly the error seems to have some connection to ext4, the sata module (sata_nv in my case), and most likely ncq. One thing that makes the problem appear to go away or at least happen very rarely is when I used these options msi=0, adma=0, swncq=0. Hope this helps.

Here is the default for sata_nv
parm: adma:Enable use of ADMA (Default: false) (bool)
parm: swncq:Enable use of SWNCQ (Default: true) (bool)
parm: msi:Enable use of MSI (Default: false) (bool)

2.6.38-11-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 29 19:02:55 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
larak@Linux-Robert:~$

[ 6825.673649] ata5: EH in SWNCQ mode,QC:qc_active 0x3C sactive 0x3C
[ 6825.673654] ata5: SWNCQ:qc_active 0x3C defer_bits 0x0 last_issue_tag 0x5
[ 6825.673656] dhfis 0x3C dmafis 0x1C sdbfis 0x3
[ 6825.673660] ata5: ATA_REG 0x41 ERR_REG 0x0
[ 6825.673663] ata5: tag : dhfis dmafis sdbfis sacitve
[ 6825.673666] ata5: tag 0x2: 1 1 0 1
[ 6825.673669] ata5: tag 0x3: 1 1 0 1
[ 6825.673672] ata5: tag 0x4: 1 1 0 1
[ 6825.673675] ata5: tag 0x5: 1 0 0 1
[ 6825.673685] ata5.00: exception Emask 0x1 SAct 0x3c SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
[ 6825.673688] ata5.00: Ata error. fis:0x21
[ 6825.673692] ata5.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[ 6825.673700] ata5.00: cmd 60/10:10:3f:9b:e6/00:00:05:00:00/40 tag 2 ncq 8192 in
[ 6825.673702] res 41/00:28:af:71:e6/00:00:05:00:00/40 Emask 0x1 (device error)
[ 6825.673706] ata5.00: status: { DRDY ERR }
[ 6825.673709] ata5.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED
[ 6825.673716] ata5.00: cmd 60/08:18:57:9b:e6/00:00:05:00:00/40 tag 3 ncq 4096 in

00:0a.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP55 SMBus (rev a3)
00:0b.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP55 USB Controller (rev a1)
00:0b.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP55 USB Controller (rev a2)
00:0d.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP55 IDE (rev a1)
00:0e.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP55 SATA Controller (rev a3)
00:0e.1 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP55 SATA Controller (rev a3)
00:0e.2 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP55 SATA Controller (rev a3)