Flood of AHCI interrupts (SATA-HDD)

bandegee · 08-03-2012, 12:19 PM

Hello:

We have an embedded system with a SATA HDD.
The system infrequently writes data to the drive.
At some point, and rather suddenly, we see the system flooded with AHCI interrupts and a similar run-up in input block IO (bi) in vmstat. [i.e., below 100 to 35K in 15 seconds]

We are using Linux kernel 2.6.37.

Any ideas where to start here? Are there any known Linux Interrupt handling bugs in the ATA, or could this be hardware related?

Regards
--B

onebuck · 08-12-2012, 12:45 PM

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

I would first rule out the HDD by looking at the logs & then use some diagnostics to test the drive.

EDIT: One other point to look at is the USB hub. System hub or external un-powered hub?