Marc Wandschneider <marcwan@microsoft.com> writes:
> 	In case anybody is working on this stuff, and is interested, I've
> 	got come up with some, um... interesting data points on problems
> 	with the wd driver (specifically the hanging disk light problem).
> 
> 	Three times now, I have been struck by the hanging disk light
> 	problem.

I had this problem as well on my IDE drive, except much worse: I would
be lucky to get through an hour without hanging, and lucky to get
through one night without destroying my filesystem.

Soren Schmidt recently posted a patch to the NetBSD-current wd driver
that adds timeout code (and a matching warning message) which works
around this problem very effectively.  Since I've applied that patch
to my kernel I have been able to use my IDE drive 100% reliably ever
since.

I'm not sure if the NetBSD team didn't see the post or chose not to
commit it.  If the latter is true, I don't see why.  Although it is
not the "correct" solution to the problem, I don't see any
disadvantages to having the timeout code.

I can send Soren's patches to anyone who is interested.  He also
posted FreeBSD patches at the same time, and I have those too.

	Mark
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Email: Mark_Weaver@brown.edu           | Brown University
PGP Key: finger mhw@cs.brown.edu       | Dept of Computer Science

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