[hardy/intrepid] read from IDE with VIA VT82C586A interface causes kernel panic

[Gabriel Pannwitz]

Do:
Boot from Xubuntu Intrepid Desktop 8.10
Ctrl - Alt - F1
sudo cat /dev/sda1 >> /dev/null

Result:
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/18655891/50_11_16-041008.jpg

My harddrive is an 250 GB IDE from Samsung, model number : SP2514N

I first ran across this issue when trying to upgrade to Hardy. Strangely, I was not able to reproduce it with the Ubuntu Intrepid Alpha 2 (running in rescue mode, without installing).

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

this issue persists in Ubuntu Desktop LiveCD Intrepid Beta from 4.10.2008

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

This attachment is just to give you an idea of what my hardware is. I took this from my Gutsy install.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

Just thought it more appropriate that this file sit on launchpads servers.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

In the past, booting from a live CD would sometimes lead to crashes on its own, sometimes while booting up, sometimes when installing files to the newly partitioned hard disk.

I have booted to the Xubuntu live CD beta from yesterday three times now without these random crashes.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

Output from lsmod, having booted without any special boot options.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

Output from lsmod, having booted with the all_generic_ide boot option passed to grub.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

Running:

sudo cat /dev/sda1 >> /dev/null

remains a consistent way to crash the system (having booted from a live CD).

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

I have to confess, I don't even know what all_generic_ide is supposed to do, I just ran across it while searching the internet and thought I would give it a try.

I am tempted to try blacklisting the ata drivers, although I don't have enough time at the moment to do a full install, just to find out that it hangs again while writing to the hard drive (which it has done in the past with Intrepid). Aside from that, I would not really know which ata driver exactly to blacklist.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

ran dmesg from a live CD boot.

found a message that sd needs to be updated

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

It seems that changing one IDE cable out so that now both cables have 80 wires fixes this problem for me. I will do some more testing in the next couple of days and reopen if necessary.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

It turns out, I can still reproduce this bug by reading from the hard drive and the CD-ROM at the same time. I have taken further pictures of kernel output, each of which seem to look a little different. Would they be helpful?

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

This bug does not occur with a self-compiled kernel 2.6.27.7 with SATA/PATA disabled.

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Per a decision made by the Ubuntu Kernel Team, bugs will longer be assigned to the ubuntu-kernel-team in Launchpad as part of the bug triage process. The ubuntu-kernel-team is being unassigned from this bug report. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeamBugPolicies for more information. Thanks.

[Jeff Silverman (jeffsilverm)]

When I try to boot either 8.04 or 8.10 on my desktop, the boot process takes about 20 minutes and eventually kicks me into busybox with an initramfs prompt.
I carefully checked the MD5 checksum before burning my CDs and did a read after write when I burned my CD. I had the same troubles 8.04. The system would take about 20 minutes and kick me into initramfs and busybox. I can still run 7.10 just fine. I also tried using all_generic_ide and rootdelay=130 in the boot string, no joy.

I read somewhere that this was a bug in a 8.04 and I was hoping that it would be fixed in 8.10. I wish I had kept that information.

I have an IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06) AMD Athlon(tm) XP 1800+ 512 MBytes of RAM.

This is a generic IDE controller with "old fashioned" IDE disk drives. What other information would be helpful?

Thank you

Jeff Silverman
jeffsilverm at gmail dot c0m

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

@Jeff: did you open the system box and check both IDE cables? They should be 80-pin cables with the long end of the cable attached to the motherboard. Normal 40-pin cables have quite large wires in them. 80-pin cables have tiny wires that may be hard to see as individual wires.

[Jeff Silverman (jeffsilverm)]

I checked the cable to the disk drive and it's 80 conductor. I also tried both the black connector at the end of the cable and the gray connector in the middle of the cable that doesn't change anything (except the drive goes from primary master to primary slave). I don't know about the cable going to the DVD writer.

Thank you

Jeff Silverman
jeffsilverm at gmail dot c0m

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

Generated by doing:
cat sda1 > null & cat scd1 > null &
while in /dev/, having booted from the Xubuntu Jaunty Alpha3 i386 alternate CD.

[Alex Lowe (lengau)]

This bug still affects Jaunty on my machine, though I haven't been able to capture a KP.

I have the same IDE controller (and what looks like the same motherboard).

From lshw:

    description: Desktop Computer
    product: VT8367-8235
    vendor: VIA Technologies, Inc.
    width: 32 bits
    capabilities: smbios-2.2 dmi-2.2
    configuration: boot=normal chassis=desktop
  *-core
       description: Motherboard
       product: VT8367-8235
       physical id: 0
     *-firmware
          description: BIOS
          vendor: Phoenix Technologies, LTD
          physical id: 0
          version: 6.00 PG (06/19/2003)
          size: 128KiB
          capacity: 192KiB
          capabilities: isa pci pnp apm upgrade shadowing escd cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy360 int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer int10video acpi usb agp ls120boot zipboot

*****SNIP*****

        *-ide
             description: IDE interface
             product: VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE
             vendor: VIA Technologies, Inc.
             physical id: 11.1
             bus info: pci@0000:00:11.1
             logical name: scsi0
             logical name: scsi1
             version: 06
             width: 32 bits
             clock: 33MHz
             capabilities: ide pm bus_master cap_list emulated
             configuration: driver=pata_via latency=32
           *-disk:0
                description: ATA Disk
                product: Maxtor 6Y160P0
                vendor: Maxtor
                physical id: 0
                bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0
                logical name: /dev/sda
                version: YAR4
                serial: Y47KX8JE
                size: 152GiB (163GB)
                capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos
                configuration: ansiversion=5 signature=00038580
              *-volume:0
                   description: EXT4 volume
                   vendor: Linux
                   physical id: 1
                   bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1
                   logical name: /dev/sda1
                   logical name: /
                   version: 1.0
                   serial: c420eb8e-fbb0-43e9-bd91-213984382fe6
                   size: 19GiB
                   capacity: 19GiB
                   capabilities: primary bootable journaled extended_attributes large_files huge_files dir_nlink recover extents ext4 ext2 initialized
                   configuration: created=2009-09-05 12:18:39 filesystem=ext4 modified=2009-10-04 12:54:30 mount.fstype=ext4 mount.options=rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,barrier=1,data=ordered mounted=2009-10-04 12:54:30 state=mounted
              *-volume:1
                   description: Linux swap volume
                   physical id: 2
                   bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2
                   logical name: /dev/sda2
                   version: 1
                   serial: 32e84da8-734e-4af1-b160-17aff229be56
                   size: 1953MiB
                   capacity: 1953MiB
                   capabilities: primary nofs swap initialized
                   configuration: filesystem=swap pagesize=40...

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

This bug report was marked as Triaged a while ago but has not had any updated comments for quite some time. Please let us know if this issue remains in the current Ubuntu release, http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download . If the issue remains, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Jeff Silverman (jeffsilverm)]

Jeremy Foshee wrote:
> This bug report was marked as Triaged a while ago but has not had any
> updated comments for quite some time. Please let us know if this issue
> remains in the current Ubuntu release,
> http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download . If the issue remains, click
> on the current status under the Status column and change the status back
> to "New". Thanks.
>
> [This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you
> inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]
>
>
Jeremy,

I upgraded my computer so I can no longer test for this problem. I'm sorry.

--
Jeff Silverman
Linux sysadmin

[Flavio Waechter (fwaechter)]

Already persists. But maybe i tried the wrong module.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

I get these errors when inserting a DVD in my DVD-ROM drive.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

I get this when I do "cat /dev/sr0 &>/dev/null &" , which reads from my DVD-ROM drive

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

I get this when doing "cat /dev/sr1 &> /dev/null &", which reads from my DVD-RW drive.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

Those three screenshots were taken with the latest kernel available for Karmic, that is with 2.6.31-20-generic.

I was also able to produce a system crash by reading from the DVD-ROM and the hard drive at the same time, but that experiment did not produce any output on screen.

My system still crashes at random intervals, but this happens more seldomly now with Karmic, so that it is much more usable. At least reading from the hard-disk seems less problematic, but reading from DVDs is definitely still a major problem.

I will run some tests with the lucid beta soon.

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

This problem seems to persist on the Lucid Beta2.

Here is a screen shot I took when reading from the hard drive and the DVD-ROM drive (under a "rescue broken system" boot).

[Gabriel Pannwitz (gabkdlly)]

I know longer have the hardware on which I had this problem, so as far as I am concerned, this bug can be marked "won't fix".

[Charlie Kravetz (cjkgeek)]

Thank you for letting us know the equipment is no longer available. I am marking this invalid because it can not be reproduced directly by the developers and can not be tested by the reporter. Please continue to report bugs you find.