Dear IDE maintainers,

I recently installed Debian unstable on an old digital personal
workstation 433au alpha (Miata) [1] with the default kernel 2.6.32
from Debian unstable. There were no obvious problems except for the
tulip network driver which produced a lot of noise [2]. Joe Perches was
so kind to provide a patch to reduce the noise. I applied the patch
against 2.6.34-rc3 and rebuilt the kernel with the 2.6.32 Debian
config using "make oldconfig". The kernel build took around 18 hours ;).

Anyway, after rebooting the machine into the new kernel (2.6.34-rc3), the
IDE driver obviously triggered a lot of errors [3] resulting in the kernel
not being able to mount the root partition.

The error message is always the same:

hda: possibly failed opcode: 0x25
drive not ready for command
status error: status=0x5a { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Index }

But please see the screenshots in [3].

The system finally dropped into a busybox. I issued a "reboot" and tried
to reboot into the Debian stock 2.6.32 kernel. However, after the IDE problem
with 2.6.34-rc3, aboot was unable to read the bootsector. When I powercycled
the machine, I could reboot properly into 2.6.32 without any problems. I
already checked the IDE cabling, the harddisk is new, btw. The problem
reproduces every time I boot into 2.6.34-rc3.

It looks like that some changes in the IDE driver between 2.6.32 and
2.6.34-rc3 somehow messed up the code on Alpha. I didn't test the
whole thing on 2.6.33.2 yet, however the machine is busy right now
building that kernel so I can try tomorrow.

The lspci output of the hardware looks like this:

test-adrian1:~# lspci
00:03.0 Ethernet controller: Digital Equipment Corporation DECchip 21142/43 (rev 30)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: Contaq Microsystems 82c693
00:07.1 IDE interface: Contaq Microsystems 82c693
00:07.2 IDE interface: Contaq Microsystems 82c693
00:07.3 USB Controller: Contaq Microsystems 82c693
00:0b.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. MGA 2064W ...
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I'm flattered but nowadays I'm just a maintainer of a modest

I think that the highest chance of bringing the right people's
attention to this kernel regression would be achieved by filling
the official bug-report at https://bugzilla.kernel.org/.

Thanks.
--
Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
--

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Hi Bartlomiej,

thank you very much for your kind reply!



Ok, I will report the problem there. Btw, the problem doesn't occur
with 2.6.33.2 either so it definetely seems to be a regression with
2.6.34. Unfortunately, I don't have the machine at hand anymore, so I
won't be able to test in near future :(. Very sorry. However, I know
someone who still has such a workstation, I will ask him to test.


Thanks,

Adrian
--

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