Re: RHEL4 SMART and SATA disks

[Ken Snider <ken snider datawire net>]

Bernd Bartmann wrote:

> Hi,
>
> what's the status of SMART support for SATA hard disks in RHEL4?
> Is libata already capable of passing SMART commands through?
>  
From the smartmontools homepage:

"Smartmontools should work correctly with SATA drives under both Linux 
2.4 and 2.6 kernels, /if/ you use the standard IDE drivers in 
drivers/ide. If you use the new libata drivers, it won't work correctly 
because libata doesn't yet support the needed ATA-passthrough ioctl() 
calls. Jeff Garzik, the libata developer, says that this support will be 
added to libata in the future. When this happens, we'll add support to 
smartmontools for a new SATA/libata device type '-d sata'. Typically, to 
force an SATA disk to run using the standard (non-libata) drivers, you 
must use the BIOS to select "legacy mode" for the controller. If the IDE 
driver doesn't support your particular SATA controller, or the 
controller doesn't have a legacy interface, then only libata can be 
used. Unless the hard disk controller on the system motherboard is 
Intel, VIA or nVidia, standard IDE drivers may not work

Note: an unofficial patch to libata 
<http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&threadm=2yY8S-4ps-33%40gated-at.bofh.it&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DLinville%2520ioctls%2520SMART%26num%3D100%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DN%26tab%3Dwg> 
that allows smartmontools to be used with the standard '-d ata' device 
type was posted to the linux kernel mailing list at the end of August 
2004. The patch is included in the libata-dev patchset 
<http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/jgarzik/libata/> that can 
be applied to a recent Linux kernel (>= 2.6.9). With a SATA disk driven 
by a libata driver, smartmontools can now be used by specifying both the 
device type 'ata' and the SCSI device corresponding to this disk, for 
example, smartctl -i -d ata /dev/sda. The patch is still under 
development and it is probably best to make sure that the disk is idle 
before trying smartmontools."

So, the question is, does this patch exist in the RHEL4 kernel?

--
Ken Snider