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authorAlan Jenkins <alan-jenkins@tuffmail.co.uk>2008-07-27 09:38:42 +0100
committerJames Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>2008-07-27 10:16:13 -0400
commit2b142900784c6e38c8d39fa57d5f95ef08e735d8 (patch)
treee7d51b58df76e864c91ff7ffca0229027328c588 /drivers/scsi/sd.h
parent4cfc51017db3e3f4eaaa2cb436a905097a4f08e2 (diff)
downloadlinux-2b142900784c6e38c8d39fa57d5f95ef08e735d8.tar.gz
[SCSI] extend the last_sector_bug flag to cover more sectors
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: Alan Jenkins <alan-jenkins@tuffmail.co.uk>
Tested-by: Alan Jenkins <alan-jenkins@tuffmail.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'drivers/scsi/sd.h')
-rw-r--r--drivers/scsi/sd.h6
1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/drivers/scsi/sd.h b/drivers/scsi/sd.h
index 550b2f70a1f8..95b9f06534d5 100644
--- a/drivers/scsi/sd.h
+++ b/drivers/scsi/sd.h
@@ -31,6 +31,12 @@
  */
 #define SD_BUF_SIZE		512
 
+/*
+ * Number of sectors at the end of the device to avoid multi-sector
+ * accesses to in the case of last_sector_bug
+ */
+#define SD_LAST_BUGGY_SECTORS	8
+
 struct scsi_disk {
 	struct scsi_driver *driver;	/* always &sd_template */
 	struct scsi_device *device;