For the Oracle Linux 5.8 Red Hat compatible kernel, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.8 kernel, and the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 Base Install, Service Pack 1 kernel, with certain hardware configurations under these kernels, nuisance error messages are generated by the kernel and the smartd service.
Systems using these kernels with smartd monitoring of the block device enabled, and configured with an internal Sun Storage 6 Gb SAS PCIe RAID host bus adapter (HBA) that is connected to a SATA drive (such as the 7101423 100GB Solid State SATA Drive) and running in RAW JBOD mode, might find multiple error messages on the system console or in /var/log/ messages that look like the following:
Feb 9 18:24:58 X4270M3host kernel: [9108.314218] sd 0:0:0:0 [sda] Sense Key: Recovered Error [current][descriptor]
Feb 9 18:24:58 X4270M3host kernel: [9108.314226] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex):
Feb 9 18:24:58 X4270M3host kernel: [9108.314229] 72 01 00 1d 00 00 00 0e 09 0c 00 00 00 00 00 00
Feb 9 18:24:58 X4270M3host kernel: [9108.314240] 00 4f 00 c2 00 50
Feb 9 18:24:58 X4270M3host kernel: [9108.314246] sd 0:0:0:0 [sda] Add. Sense ATA pass through information available.
Affected hardware and software:
Sun Storage 6 Gb SAS PCIe RAID HBA, Internal option card (SGX-SAS6-R-INT-Z and SG-SAS6-R-INT-Z)
Oracle Linux 5.8 with Red Hat compatible kernel
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.8
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1
Releases 1.0 and later
Workaround:
The impact of this condition is minimal. The log messages are alarming, but there is no error condition. For Oracle Linux 5.8 using the Red Hat compatible kernel and RHEL 5.8, and SLES 11 SP1, you can choose to ignore the messages, disable smartd, or update to the latest errata kernel.
Disable smartd monitoring of all JBOD SATA drives under the Sun Storage 6 Gb SAS PCIe RAID HBA controllers. Use the smartctl command to disable monitoring of the drive and to verify drive monitor status.
Update to the latest errata kernel from SUSE. The new SUSE kernels have a patch applied to quiet this message. You can find the errata kernel on the SUSE Support Site at: http://download.novell.com/. Errata kernels are usually restricted to those with a valid SUSE support contract.
DISABLE: The following example disables smartctl service monitoring of block device /dev/sda.
X4270M3host3 host:~ # smartctl -s off /dev/sda
smartctl 5.39 2008-10-24 22:33 [x86_64-suse-linux-gnu] (openSUSE RPM) Copyright (C) 2002-8 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net ===START of ENABE/DISABLE COMMANDS section=== SMART Disabled. Use option -s with argument ???on' to enable it. VERIFY: this example verifies the smartd monitoring status of device /dev/sdb
X4270M3host~ # smartctl -i /dev/sda
smartctl 5.39 2008-10-24 22:33 [x86_64-suse-linux-gnu] (openSUSE RPM) Copyright (C) 2002-8 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net ===START of INFORMATION SECTION=== Device Model: INTEL SSDSA2BZ100G3S Serial Number: CVLV11830001100AGN Firmware Version: 6PS10362 User Capacity: 100,030,242,816 bytes Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 4 Local Time is: Fri Feb 10 09:48:34 2012 EST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: disabled SMART Disabled. Use option -s with argument ???on' to enable it.