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Bug 123172

Summary: sys-power/athcool, data loss, performance issues
Product: Gentoo Linux Reporter: Andreas Klauer <Andreas.Klauer>
Component: New packagesAssignee: Gentoo's Team for Core System packages <base-system>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: normal    
Priority: High    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Package list:
Runtime testing required: ---

Description Andreas Klauer 2006-02-17 07:42:02 UTC
Hi,

I've emerged athcool some time ago, and was using it for weeks without any issues. However, I just found out it causes problems with external firewire devices - depending on the type of device, you'll get data loss or bad performance. This is 100% reproducible on my hardware:

- Athlon XP 2000+ (Palomino)
- VIA KT333 (Chaintech Apogee 7VJL board)
- Creative Labs SB Audigy FireWire Port
- Oxford 911 based firewire bridge
- vanilla 2.6.15.3 kernel

Oxford 911 bridges with 3xx firmware give bad performance while athcool is running; using 4xx firmware anything you write to a device (tested with harddisk, DVD writer) will be completely garbled. Unfortunately I was using the 4xx firmware originally, so I lost like 80GB of data before finding out the cause.

The kernel only shows this concerning the problem:
sde: Current: sense key=0x0
    ASC=0x0 ASCQ=0x0
This message will repeat once for each write access, so it repeats a lot when accessing hard disks.

On a sidenote, the warning shown when emerging athcool may be a bit short. With the currently stable (can dangerous software as this be stable?) ebuild v0.3.9, it just says:
 * WARNING:  This program can cause instability in your system.
 * Use at your own risk!

It should say the following (taken from the athcool program itself):
 * WARNING: Depending on your motherboard and/or hardware components, 
 * enabling Athlon powersaving mode may cause:
 * - noisy or distorted sound playback
 * - a slowdown in harddisk performance
 * - system locks or instability
 * - massive filesystem corruption
 * USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Comment 1 SpanKY gentoo-dev 2006-02-17 22:43:27 UTC
added warning from upstream author's site