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Date:      Fri, 12 Mar 1999 08:50:01 -0800 (PST)
From:      Andrew Heybey <ath@niksun.com>
To:        freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: kern/10243: Under heavy disk and network load read(2) can return garbage.
Message-ID:  <199903121650.IAA61160@freefall.freebsd.org>

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The following reply was made to PR kern/10243; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Andrew Heybey <ath@niksun.com>
To: freebsd-gnats-submit@freebsd.org, mike@smith.net.au
Cc:  
Subject: Re: kern/10243: Under heavy disk and network load read(2) can return garbage.
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 11:44:21 -0500

 This bug (under simulataneous heavy disk and network activity reads
 from disk appear to suffer from short DMA tranfers resulting in incorrect
 data being returned by read(2)) appears to be a hardware bug.
 
 The motherboard on the systems on which I experienced the problem is
 an Asus P2B-LS with on-board intel ethernet and AIC7890 SCSI
 controller.  If I change the "PCI Latency" BIOS setting from the
 default of 32 to 64, the problem seems to go away.  At least I can run 
 my test programs overnight without a failure while previously they
 would not run for more than 10-20 minutes.
 
 My hypothesis is that the 7890 is not getting sufficient PCI bus
 bandwidth to keep up with the disks and that there is some bug either
 in the controller or the disks (IBM Ultrastart 9LZX) such that they
 lose part of a transfer in this cas.  I am not very familiar with the
 SCSI protocol, but I would think that there is some way that the
 controller could apply backpressure to the disk to ask it to slow down
 if the controller's FIFOs are getting full.  To lose data either the
 controller is not applying back pressure or the disk is ignoring it.
 
 This PR can be closed, and I apologize for jumping to the conclusion
 that this is a FreeBSD bug.
 
 andrew
 


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