How did they figure this out?
How did they figure this out?
Posted Nov 2, 2003 12:49 UTC (Sun) by axboe (subscriber, #904)In reply to: How did they figure this out? by giraffedata
Parent article: Mandrake Linux 9.2 and self-destructing CD-ROM drives
It was actually pretty easy. The event of discovering this was some years ago, when Compaq used LG drives. A recently added patch in the SUSE kernel fried two drives at SUSE testing labs, so it was fairly easy to find out that it was the FLUSH_CACHE that was at fault. Debug and discovery was done by myself.
Now fast forward two years, two weeks ago. Mandrake fries CD-ROM drives, apprently this LG drive bug never got fixed at the source (LG). Unfortunate that the packet writing bug (issuing unconditional FLUSH_CACHE) never got fixed, stupid that LG still has that very serious bug. And very unfortunate for Mandrake.