1. 27 Jul, 2008 1 commit
    • Alan Jenkins's avatar
      [SCSI] extend the last_sector_bug flag to cover more sectors · 2b142900
      Alan Jenkins authored
      The last_sector_bug flag was added to work around a bug in certain usb
      cardreaders, where they would crash if a multiple sector read included the
      last sector. The original implementation avoids this by e.g. splitting an 8
      sector read which includes the last sector into a 7 sector read, and a single
      sector read for the last sector.  The flag is enabled for all USB devices.
      
      This revealed a second bug in other usb cardreaders, which crash when they
      get a multiple sector read which stops 1 sector short of the last sector.
      Affected hardware includes the Kingston "MobileLite" external USB cardreader
      and the internal USB cardreader on the Asus EeePC.
      
      Extend the last_sector_bug workaround to ensure that any access which touches
      the last 8 hardware sectors of the device is a single sector long.  Requests
      are shrunk as necessary to meet this constraint.
      
      This gives us a safety margin against potential unknown or future bugs
      affecting multi-sector access to the end of the device.  The two known bugs
      only affect the last 2 sectors.  However, they suggest that these devices
      are prone to fencepost errors and that multi-sector access to the end of the
      device is not well tested.  Popular OS's use multi-sector accesses, but they
      rarely read the last few sectors.  Linux (with udev & vol_id) automatically
      reads sectors from the end of the device on insertion.  It is assumed that
      single sector accesses are more thoroughly tested during development.
      Signed-off-by: default avatarAlan Jenkins <alan-jenkins@tuffmail.co.uk>
      Tested-by: default avatarAlan Jenkins <alan-jenkins@tuffmail.co.uk>
      Signed-off-by: default avatarJames Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
      2b142900
  2. 26 Jul, 2008 39 commits