Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - back to the OP ;-)
david writes: > Daniel Pittman wrote: >> david writes: >>> Daniel Pittman wrote: david writes: [...] >>> ChipDriver NCQ DMA++ hotplug PMP >>> ICH7 family ata_piix, ahci AHCIAHCIAHCIno >>> >>> Since I still don't want to fry the drive, the question still remains >>> (for me at least, given that I'm not as erudite as some) Will this >>> hotplug?? >> >> Yes, if you are running it in AHCI mode. Specifically, you have to be >> in something other than "compatibility mode" in the BIOS, and it has to >> identify as an AHCI controller during boot. [...] > Nothing in dmesg. As far as I can see, nothing in BIOS :( That sucks. Sadly, it was the fashion for vendors to offer only the compatibility mode of operation for a while. You could try "lsmod | egrep 'ahci|piix'" and see what the output is. If both are present, and both are in active use life is harder, but just one present would be a start. > This seems to suggest that hot swapping this particular configuration > is a bad idea. And yet Gnome was telling me that I could remove the > media. Is this a bug? Well, I have no idea, I fear. > Unfortunately, hardware specifications tend to tell you what a > BIOS/Controller/MB *has*, not what it doesn't have. *nod* Also, the "operating mode" is probably not going to be listed, so even "ICH7 SATA" doesn't tell you everything you need to know. [...] > Not being able to hot-swap for me is mostly an inconvenience rather > than a disaster, but I recently had an emergency situations where I > would REALLY liked to have been able to hot swap. *nod* Well, you /could/ test it: drop to single user mode, remount critical filesystems read-only, sync, and pull the device. Then look for error messages. ;) Regards, Daniel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - back to the OP ;-)
Daniel Pittman wrote: david writes: Daniel Pittman wrote: david writes: (Admittedly, the last is only on really bad hardware, but hey, that hardware is out there and still within the reasonable life of machines for home users.) Anyway, once the hardware doesn't die completely you still need the driver stack to notice and remove the now absent hardware from the software "shadow" representation. Crap controllers are just that - crap ;-) Returning to the original inquiry, and now that I know that I have a 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (Intel) How do I go about finding out if it's safe to hot-swap? Did you try the libata status report page I posted the link to a while back? That should confirm that your ICH7 supports hotplug. http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SATA_hardware_features When you posted I didn't know which controller was in there, now I do. ChipDriver NCQ DMA++ hotplug PMP ICH7 family ata_piix, ahci AHCIAHCIAHCIno Since I still don't want to fry the drive, the question still remains (for me at least, given that I'm not as erudite as some) Will this hotplug?? Yes, if you are running it in AHCI mode. Specifically, you have to be in something other than "compatibility mode" in the BIOS, and it has to identify as an AHCI controller during boot. Check the kernel messages after boot to confirm that: dmesg | grep -i ahci Nothing in dmesg. As far as I can see, nothing in BIOS :( This seems to suggest that hot swapping this particular configuration is a bad idea. And yet Gnome was telling me that I could remove the media. Is this a bug? Unfortunately, hardware specifications tend to tell you what a BIOS/Controller/MB *has*, not what it doesn't have. Which means that for people like me, it comes down to * asking in expert forums (like SLUG?) * guess and hope for the best * do nothing. Not being able to hot-swap for me is mostly an inconvenience rather than a disaster, but I recently had an emergency situations where I would REALLY liked to have been able to hot swap. regards, David. PS: the technical discussion about hot-swapping is fascinating, but I would still like to solve the immediate problem. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - "Internals of the sync/umount call"
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 11:04:33AM +1000, Grahame Kelly wrote: > > On 16/05/2009, at 5:53 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote: > >> On Sat, May 16, 2009, Grahame Kelly wrote: >> >>> Rather than stating what I suspect is just a "belief", have you look >>> at the Kernel source code at all? If so I would be very interested at [snip] > I am not disputing that some drives or controllers may not be standards > conforming (at times this is more than likely). If and only if a drive, > or/and its controller conform to such standards, then whatever data > stream needs to be written by the subsystem on the completeion of a > "sync" or in response to a "umount" is suppose to ensure that such data > is stored on the media either before the status response is returned to > the driving s/w or is warranted to have done so. If this didn't happen > then all hell would break loose (which is what your saying). > > I don't believe much if anything at all. > > We both have discovered via our experiences when "things" don't work > a.k.a. don't conform to a standard - this is when structures or such > methodologies break. > Under POSIX "umount" is suppose to warrant such for the device, its > controlling structures and associated kernel drive tables. If the > system(s) don't - then they simply are non-conforming implementations - > That is ALL. > I think you missed the point about partitions sitting on LVM sitting on raid. if you umount a lvm partition the block device provided by lvm is unmounted - but the lvm group and potentially the raid device underneath isn't. Your about statement is only really true when we used drive directory and not via DM or LVM [snip] > Cheers. > Grahame > >> >> Adrian >> > > -- "The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law." - George W. Bush 11/22/2000 Austin, TX signature.asc Description: Digital signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - "Internals of the sync/umount call"
On 16/05/2009, at 5:53 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote: On Sat, May 16, 2009, Grahame Kelly wrote: Rather than stating what I suspect is just a "belief", have you look at the Kernel source code at all? If so I would be very interested at exactly where you state such activity happens. According to Linux Internals Doco (and hereijn I refer to the Linux Drivers themselves) Once the device has been "un-mounted" the OS warrants that the device, its linked control blocks, buffers etc. are indeed-flushed and data secured on the device medium. The applicable driver HAVE already unloaded any cache data before the umount command returns with its resultant response. And I assume that you 100% believe that when the drive says "YES SIR I HAVE SYNCED" it has actually done this? :) Hi Adrian. It is all part of the standards each industry strives for. SATA drive manufactures validate and belong to the applicable standards groups just for these reasons. I am not disputing that some drives or controllers may not be standards conforming (at times this is more than likely). If and only if a drive, or/and its controller conform to such standards, then whatever data stream needs to be written by the subsystem on the completeion of a "sync" or in response to a "umount" is suppose to ensure that such data is stored on the media either before the status response is returned to the driving s/w or is warranted to have done so. If this didn't happen then all hell would break loose (which is what your saying). I don't believe much if anything at all. We both have discovered via our experiences when "things" don't work a.k.a. don't conform to a standard - this is when structures or such methodologies break. Under POSIX "umount" is suppose to warrant such for the device, its controlling structures and associated kernel drive tables. If the system(s) don't - then they simply are non-conforming implementations - That is ALL. I have never experienced this in all the years working with Linux. Either you haven't un-mounted the device correctly (that is checked the return status byte if in a script), or the OS release you refer to is/was buggy, Or you've been lucky! Whatever. FWIW, SATA devices are hot-swap and the are ... a little less than 8mm of coverage for those connections. Just sayin' SATA I, II and forthcoming III specifications originally covered hot- swapping. So it would be expected at the hardware level. Its optional. And it is not always implemented correctly. I have some notes somewhere from some previous experiments with various desktop-y SATA chipsets under FreeBSD/Linux and I found that they didn't all do hotswap as advertised. ;) Your correct to say "And it is not always implemented correctly" -- That is exactly what I am trying to show through this discussion. It is your experiments that I and others are interested in. We may together be able to: A> narrow the problem down - and if it is a Linux or driver implementation - make and forward a patch in making the OS better compliant. B> If its a drive issue, advise the manufacture, or simply advise others not to purchase same because of these issues. C> Find a work-around - be it a operational, hardware or software one. And advise others not just in SLUG but the wider Linux/FreeBSD world. Thats my main point of this followup. Not an person to person agreement - rather a technical follow up to narrow down and implement a solution as I already have pointed out. Keep tracking those problematic issues, Set up a controlled test, document it and forward it to others so they may test the same and return their results to you. Cheers. Grahame Adrian -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] LVM
2009/5/15 Steve Kowalik : > Daniel Bush wrote: >> That sounds fraught. >> Are you sure I can't just go with the alternate cd which will walk me thru >> lvm and still give me a desktop kernel/system? >> > > Indeed you can. You can even download the alternate CD with jigdo! Apparently yes, from googl'ing around now. When I picked up this procedure about a year ago I figured from searching around that it was a known shortcoming of Ubuntu installation that it didn't support LVM. Thanks for the correction. --Amos -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] hot swapping hard drives
On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 6:19 PM, Daniel Pittman wrote: > Tony Sceats writes: > >>> The CLI command "umount" does this within the Linux / Unix OS. > >> > >> That should have the filesystem flush data, but doesn't actually push > >> out dirty pages for the device — if you accessed it raw at any point > >> this will not be sufficient. > >> > >> (Also, lower layers such as LVM, software RAID, etc, might not flush > >> their data during the unmount process.) > >> > >>> The "sync" command/programming API call is another way to do this > >>> programmatically. > >> > >> That will flush raw blocks from the device also. > >> > >>> That is all that is required. > >> > >> Those are necessary, but not sufficient, steps, I fear. > > > > so if our raw partitions are up-to-date and the file systems are also, > > thanks to the 'sync' and 'umount' commands done before device removal, > > what else are you implying would be necessary before the drive is > > safely pulled? > > Didn't I already answer this in the text you cut? > > Your controller needs to support SATA hotplug sanely. Your controller > needs to report the event to the driver. The driver needs to handle the > event sanely. o sorry :( I had taken all that on board and I had just read it as though you were alluding to more things being necessary even again, that's all.. in fact it's precisely because I thought you'd had it all pretty well covered that I was confused by that line.. anyway, classically wrong reading of language in an email, who would ever have thought ;) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - "Internals of the sync/umount call"
david writes: > Daniel Pittman wrote: >> david writes: > (Admittedly, the last is only on really bad hardware, but hey, that > hardware is out there and still within the reasonable life of machines > for home users.) > > Anyway, once the hardware doesn't die completely you still need the > driver stack to notice and remove the now absent hardware from the > software "shadow" representation. Crap controllers are just that - crap ;-) >>> Returning to the original inquiry, and now that I know that I have a >>> 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (Intel) How do I go >>> about finding out if it's safe to hot-swap? >> >> Did you try the libata status report page I posted the link to a while >> back? That should confirm that your ICH7 supports hotplug. >> > > http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SATA_hardware_features > > When you posted I didn't know which controller was in there, now I do. > > Chip Driver NCQ DMA++ hotplug PMP > ICH7 family ata_piix, ahci AHCIAHCIAHCIno > > Since I still don't want to fry the drive, the question still remains > (for me at least, given that I'm not as erudite as some) Will this > hotplug?? Yes, if you are running it in AHCI mode. Specifically, you have to be in something other than "compatibility mode" in the BIOS, and it has to identify as an AHCI controller during boot. Check the kernel messages after boot to confirm that: dmesg | grep -i ahci > especially since other controllers on this page are listed simply as > "hotplug: yes" rather than "hotplug: AHCI". Fair point. Sorry, I should have been clearer. > I guess I could just get an old SATA drive and try it, but from the > discussion there also seems to be a question mark about frying the > PSU. If it makes you feel any better you can't *physically* damage a SATA device hotplugging it. You could corrupt the data on it if Linux hadn't written everything out, and you could crash your system, but nothing worse than that. Regards, Daniel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - "Internals of the sync/umount call"
Daniel Pittman wrote: > david writes: (Admittedly, the last is only on really bad hardware, but hey, that hardware is out there and still within the reasonable life of machines for home users.) Anyway, once the hardware doesn't die completely you still need the driver stack to notice and remove the now absent hardware from the software "shadow" representation. >>> Crap controllers are just that - crap ;-) >> Returning to the original inquiry, and now that I know that I have a >> 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (Intel) How do I go >> about finding out if it's safe to hot-swap? > > Did you try the libata status report page I posted the link to a while > back? That should confirm that your ICH7 supports hotplug. > http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/SATA_hardware_features When you posted I didn't know which controller was in there, now I do. ChipDriver NCQ DMA++ hotplug PMP ICH7 family ata_piix, ahci AHCIAHCIAHCIno Since I still don't want to fry the drive, the question still remains (for me at least, given that I'm not as erudite as some) Will this hotplug?? especially since other controllers on this page are listed simply as "hotplug: yes" rather than "hotplug: AHCI". I guess I could just get an old SATA drive and try it, but from the discussion there also seems to be a question mark about frying the PSU. many thanks, David -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - "Internals of the sync/umount call"
Adrian Chadd writes: > On Sat, May 16, 2009, Grahame Kelly wrote: [...] >> >FWIW, SATA devices are hot-swap and the are ... a little less than >> >8mm of coverage for those connections. Just sayin' >> >> SATA I, II and forthcoming III specifications originally covered hot- >> swapping. So it would be expected at the hardware level. > > Its optional. And it is not always implemented correctly. Hot-swap is mandatory in the SATA spec, but not all controller chips report it in a meaningful way to the OS. Unfortunately, while they (theoretically) have to support the operation no one told their interface designers about that.[1] > I have some notes somewhere from some previous experiments with > various desktop-y SATA chipsets under FreeBSD/Linux and I found that > they didn't all do hotswap as advertised. ;) *nod* Likewise, Linux was a lot more troublesome. The OP has recent enough hardware that his life is fine, if he is using the ICH7 in AHCI mode though. Lucky him, and lucky the rest of us now that hotplug is pretty much a standard feature. Regards, Daniel Footnotes: [1] ...well, in fairness, a bunch of the early hardware was just a PATA controller with a SATA bridge plugged in, or operated in a mode that looked just like a PATA controller with no hot-plug support. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - "Internals of the sync/umount call"
Grahame Kelly writes: >> From: Daniel Pittman >> Grahame Kelly writes: [...] >> That only handles the hot *UN*-plug side of things, and can cause >> significant grief to you if the driver doesn't cope: anything from >> several minutes in which *all* disks on that controller are unavailable >> during error handling, through to a controller hang. > > Rather than stating what I suspect is just a "belief", have you look > at the Kernel source code at all? I am a little curious why you suspect this is "just a belief", but to answer your question, yes. I /do/ know what the kernel does, as well as having some idea of how various controllers handle (or fail to) the hotplug events. I even tested some improvements to the libata error handler, way back when, when it turns out that I owned one of the controllers where a little extra hand-holding in the error handler after a hotplug event. > If so I would be very interested at exactly where you state such > activity happens. What, you mean hardware or drivers that don't cope? Well, the NVIDIA SATA drivers had some problems that would cause a long, long delay trying error recovery if a device got unplugged. IIRC, an inverted bit in the sense data returned from the controller was responsible, but it has been some time. > According to Linux Internals Doco (and hereijn I refer to the Linux > Drivers themselves) Once the device has been "un-mounted" the OS > warrants that the device, its linked control blocks, buffers etc. are > indeed-flushed and data secured on the device medium. Sure. What that has to do with drivers that don't cope with error recovery from a hot-unplug of a device, though, I don't quite follow. [...] >> After all, you don't want /dev/sdb hanging about when the disk itself >> has been removed, taking up a slot and making life miserable. :) > > I have never experienced this in all the years working with Linux. Well, I am surprised. Certainly, on non-hotplug hardware the behaviour of a Linux block device driver is to keep the "device" around and report appropriate errors. > Either you haven't un-mounted the device correctly (that is checked > the return status byte if in a script), or the OS release you refer to > is/was buggy, On the other hand, it seems we are talking about different things here. Yes, if a driver that supports hotplug, with hardware that supports hotplug, fails to remove the software "device" after the hardware is gone it has a bug. [...] >> (Also, lower layers such as LVM, software RAID, etc, might not flush >> their data during the unmount process.) > > Yep every driver should - otherwise they are badly designed and > implemented. I don't think you quite follow: if you unmount a filesystem in an LV, but keep the PV active, LVM can quite reasonably keep metadata active and in memory. You have to deactivate the PV for that to change, which is the equivalent LVM operation to unmount for a filesystem. Software RAID behaves in a similar fashion. [...] > Yes but that is my point! - This is all part of the kernel drivers > responsibility - read all about this in the source code... and the > kernel internals. Hence, there is no need to portray "the overside" > of hot swapping as problematic - you put it. Sorry, I don't follow you. I don't recall, and can't find in my text, a reference to "the overside" of hot swapping. Can you clarify what you were responding to there? >>> On the hardware side, the PSU socket must ensure that power is >>> presented to the drive before logic is connected (ground first). This >>> is why the +12v, +5v and GND pins are usually extended about 8mm >>> before the rest of the pins are connected. >> >> FWIW, SATA devices are hot-swap and the are ... a little less than >> 8mm of coverage for those connections. Just sayin' > > SATA I, II and forthcoming III specifications originally covered hot- > swapping. So it would be expected at the hardware level. My point was that there is not an 8mm long electrical connector on a SATA cable, or device. Nothing more than that. Regards, Daniel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - "Internals of the sync/umount call"
david writes: >>> (Admittedly, the last is only on really bad hardware, but hey, that >>> hardware is out there and still within the reasonable life of machines >>> for home users.) >>> >>> Anyway, once the hardware doesn't die completely you still need the >>> driver stack to notice and remove the now absent hardware from the >>> software "shadow" representation. >> >> Crap controllers are just that - crap ;-) > > Returning to the original inquiry, and now that I know that I have a > 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (Intel) How do I go > about finding out if it's safe to hot-swap? Did you try the libata status report page I posted the link to a while back? That should confirm that your ICH7 supports hotplug. Regards, Daniel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] hot swapping hard drives
Tony Sceats writes: >>> The CLI command "umount" does this within the Linux / Unix OS. >> >> That should have the filesystem flush data, but doesn't actually push >> out dirty pages for the device — if you accessed it raw at any point >> this will not be sufficient. >> >> (Also, lower layers such as LVM, software RAID, etc, might not flush >> their data during the unmount process.) >> >>> The "sync" command/programming API call is another way to do this >>> programmatically. >> >> That will flush raw blocks from the device also. >> >>> That is all that is required. >> >> Those are necessary, but not sufficient, steps, I fear. > > so if our raw partitions are up-to-date and the file systems are also, > thanks to the 'sync' and 'umount' commands done before device removal, > what else are you implying would be necessary before the drive is > safely pulled? Didn't I already answer this in the text you cut? Your controller needs to support SATA hotplug sanely. Your controller needs to report the event to the driver. The driver needs to handle the event sanely. > (obviously I'm referring only to on the hot un-plug side, the hot-plug > side obviously involves a different sequence of events, or is that > what you're referring to with 'not sufficient'?) No, I mean specifically that what you listed is necessary, but not sufficient, to have function hot-unplug of SATA devices under Linux. Regards, Daniel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: lshal, gnome-device-manager, was Re: [SLUG] hot swapping hard drives
> lshal is PERFECT and I didn't know it existed. Much nicer than the gnome > version. Having said that, why did Ubuntu take it out? Given that it is only a diagnostic tool and serves no other purpose (and we have lshal anyway), it lost out during one of the difficult "we have two days until release and we need to shave 1MB off the ISO image" (or it won't fit on a CD-ROM) discussions. (From memory, that was just one release before g-d-m was rewritten in C and had more useful device management functions added -> it's now much smaller!) - Jeff -- linux.conf.au 2010: Wellington, NZ http://www.penguinsvisiting.org.nz/ Broken hearts rarely come with "Some Assembly Required" stickers. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - "Internals of the sync/umount call"
>> (Admittedly, the last is only on really bad hardware, but hey, that >> hardware is out there and still within the reasonable life of machines >> for home users.) >> >> Anyway, once the hardware doesn't die completely you still need the >> driver stack to notice and remove the now absent hardware from the >> software "shadow" representation. >> > > Crap controllers are just that - crap ;-) > Returning to the original inquiry, and now that I know that I have a 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (Intel) How do I go about finding out if it's safe to hot-swap? Google hasn't been very helpful thus far, perhaps because I'm asking the wrong question. Of course, someone might say "hey I've got one of those and it's fine" but if someone was reading this in the archives and wanted to find out about slightly different hardware, how would you find out? I'm old fashioned enough that it's about the fishing rather than the fish ;-) -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - "Internals of the sync/umount call"
On Sat, May 16, 2009, Grahame Kelly wrote: > Rather than stating what I suspect is just a "belief", have you look > at the Kernel source code at all? If so I would be very interested at > exactly where you state such activity happens. > According to Linux Internals Doco (and hereijn I refer to the Linux > Drivers themselves) Once the device has been "un-mounted" the OS > warrants that the device, its linked control blocks, buffers etc. > are indeed-flushed and data secured on the device medium. The > applicable driver HAVE already unloaded any cache data before the > umount command returns with its resultant response. And I assume that you 100% believe that when the drive says "YES SIR I HAVE SYNCED" it has actually done this? :) > I have never experienced this in all the years working with Linux. > Either you haven't un-mounted the device correctly (that is checked > the return status byte if in a script), or the OS release you refer to > is/was buggy, Or you've been lucky! > >FWIW, SATA devices are hot-swap and the are ... a little less than 8mm > >of coverage for those connections. Just sayin' > > SATA I, II and forthcoming III specifications originally covered hot- > swapping. So it would be expected at the hardware level. Its optional. And it is not always implemented correctly. I have some notes somewhere from some previous experiments with various desktop-y SATA chipsets under FreeBSD/Linux and I found that they didn't all do hotswap as advertised. ;) Adrian -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
lshal, gnome-device-manager, was Re: [SLUG] hot swapping hard drives
Thanks Jeremy, lshal is PERFECT and I didn't know it existed. Much nicer than the gnome version. Having said that, why did Ubuntu take it out? I now know that I have an 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller which may help with the original question ;-) David Jeremy Visser wrote: On Sat, 2009-05-16 at 13:49 +1000, david wrote: While on the subject, Ubuntu used to have a convenient little applet that gave a list of installed hardware. It seems to have vanished. Does anyone know what it was called and whether it still exists? It's called gnome-device-manager, which indeed is no longer installed by default. There is, however, an eponymous package which will get it back for you. (Unlike the one that used to be in Ubuntu, it puts itself in Applications → System Tools → Device Manager.) gnome-device-manager (which I almost abbreviated as 'gdm' just then) is just a graphical frontend to HAL. You can get the exact same information, albeit in text form, with the lshal utility. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] HOT SWAPPING - "Internals of the sync/umount call"
On 16/05/2009, at 4:32 PM, slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote: From: Daniel Pittman Date: 16 May 2009 4:31:34 PM To: slug@slug.org.au Subject: Re: [SLUG] hot swapping hard drives Grahame Kelly writes: Of the seven systems I look after, three have hot-swapping HDA's via a RAID5/6 drive enclosures, two systems have add-on SATAII caddies for hot-swap and the others are without hot-swapping. If your interested, and to reset your angst a little, I have been in the computing/engineering industry for 25++ years. On the software level the OS only has to ensure that all dirty (written too) memory pages are written out to the drives and such buffering flushed, drive index tables updated and written ALL before the drive is removed. That only handles the hot *UN*-plug side of things, and can cause significant grief to you if the driver doesn't cope: anything from several minutes in which *all* disks on that controller are unavailable during error handling, through to a controller hang. Rather than stating what I suspect is just a "belief", have you look at the Kernel source code at all? If so I would be very interested at exactly where you state such activity happens. According to Linux Internals Doco (and hereijn I refer to the Linux Drivers themselves) Once the device has been "un-mounted" the OS warrants that the device, its linked control blocks, buffers etc. are indeed-flushed and data secured on the device medium. The applicable driver HAVE already unloaded any cache data before the umount command returns with its resultant response. (Admittedly, the last is only on really bad hardware, but hey, that hardware is out there and still within the reasonable life of machines for home users.) Anyway, once the hardware doesn't die completely you still need the driver stack to notice and remove the now absent hardware from the software "shadow" representation. Crap controllers are just that - crap ;-) After all, you don't want /dev/sdb hanging about when the disk itself has been removed, taking up a slot and making life miserable. :) I have never experienced this in all the years working with Linux. Either you haven't un-mounted the device correctly (that is checked the return status byte if in a script), or the OS release you refer to is/was buggy, (Oh, and, of course, the hardware needs to be able to notify the driver that the device did actually go away, which not all hardware can.) Again - read the source code. The CLI command "umount" does this within the Linux / Unix OS. That should have the filesystem flush data, but doesn't actually push out dirty pages for the device — if you accessed it raw at any point this will not be sufficient. It was never mentioned about mounting raw. As everyone should know - your on your own if you mount any device raw, as you become the only one responsible for its connectivity, data control and reliability. (Also, lower layers such as LVM, software RAID, etc, might not flush their data during the unmount process.) Yep every driver should - otherwise they are badly designed and implemented. The "sync" command/programming API call is another way to do this programmatically. That will flush raw blocks from the device also. That is all that is required. Those are necessary, but not sufficient, steps, I fear. Also, on the hotplug side, where a new device is added, your driver needs to cope with detecting the device addition, probing it and ensuring the hardware copes, and with reporting that up the software stack. Yes but that is my point! - This is all part of the kernel drivers responsibility - read all about this in the source code... and the kernel internals. Hence, there is no need to portray "the overside" of hot swapping as problematic - you put it. On the hardware side, the PSU socket must ensure that power is presented to the drive before logic is connected (ground first). This is why the +12v, +5v and GND pins are usually extended about 8mm before the rest of the pins are connected. FWIW, SATA devices are hot-swap and the are ... a little less than 8mm of coverage for those connections. Just sayin' SATA I, II and forthcoming III specifications originally covered hot- swapping. So it would be expected at the hardware level. Cheers. Grahame Regards, Daniel -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
