Perry Metzger writes:
>> > Are you referring to the `verification' utility in the BIOS?  There's
>> > certainly no facility in either host adapter to do remapping at run
>> > time; it's the responsibility of either the device or the driver to do
>> > that.
>>> 
>> And many devices have it disabled by default and as shipped.  If you
>> want the drive to remap on write failures or after read retries turn
>> on AWRE and ARRE in mode page 1.  You can lift the code from FreeBSD
>> sbin/scsi and lib/libscsi or write a utility using the user mode scsi
>> ioctl.
>
>It should be on by default in NetBSD. Since it apparently isn't at the
>moment, does anyone have a utility that does what was just described?

*What* should be on by default in NetBSD?

Mode page settings on SCSI devices are persistent, aren't they?  I don't think
the device driver should frob even well-defined bits in the drive's
configuration data -- what if the user has turned off device block remapping
for a reason?

Making the *driver* explicitly tell the drive to remap blocks with errors is
a different issue.

The AWRE and ARRE bits in mode page 1 tell the *drive* to remap itself.  I
can't recall whether that implies doing so silently or not -- I think it does,
which is probably a good reason to do it in the driver instead, particularly
since in that case the user might have turned them off *so that* he can see the
errors.