Re: USB harddisk drive fails on 2.6.23-rc3 (regression)

Hi Alan,

On Sun, 19 Aug 2007 11:08:00 -0400 (EDT), Alan Stern wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Aug 2007, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > I just bought myself an external hard disk drive for my backups:
> > 
> > $ lsusb
> > (...)
> > Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0bc2:3000 Seagate RSS LLC
> > (...)
> > 
> > I found that I was not able to list the partition table (fdisk -l)
> > under a 2.6.23-rc3 kernel (let alone change it), while rebooting under
> > 2.6.22.3 the partition table could be read. I finally tracked it down
> > to CONFIG_USB_SUSPEND=y, when this option is disabled "fdisk -l" works
> > again on 2.6.23-rc3. I could also get it to work again by reverting
> > commit 8dfe4b14869fd185ca25ee88b02ada58a3005eaf ("usb-storage: implement
> > autosuspend") as was reported by other users recently.
> 
> > Do I have to add my drive to the USB quirk list (as either
> > USB_QUIRK_RESET_RESUME or USB_QUIRK_NO_AUTOSUSPEND), or is there a
> > better way to address the problem?
> 
> There are lots of possible ways to address this.  Worth trying is
> to enable the "allow_restart" attribute for the drive.  The attribute
> file appears in the sysfs directory for the disk; you may have to
> search around a little to find exactly where it is.  Also you may have
> to use the blockdev command to force the system to read the partition
> table after turning on allow_restart.

Yes, that worked. After writing 1 to allow_restart and running
"blockdev --rereadpt /dev/sda", the partition table can be read with
"fdisk -l /dev/sda" again.

Am I supposed to add these commands to my init scripts, or is there
another way to make the effect permanent?

> (Perhaps allow_restart should be on by default for all SCSI devices.  
> That's a question which should be raised on the linux-scsi mailing 
> list.)
> 
> You might also want to increase the idle-time delay used for 
> autosuspending the drive; the default value is 2 seconds, which is too 
> low for heavily-used disks.  The autosuspend delay is stored in the 
> "autosuspend" attribute in the USB device's power/ subdirectory in 
> sysfs.

Well, increasing the autosuspend delay only makes the problem reappear
after a longer period of time, but this doesn't actually fix it.

-- 
Jean Delvare

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