Troubleshooting DMA and LBA Errors

Non-Fatal Errors

SETFEATURES Error

Newer snapshots and releases of pfSense® software attempt to setup APM for an ATA hard drive at boot. Sometimes the detection yields a non-fatal error when trying to find if the value is supported, or when the drive claims it’s supported but can’t set it. That error is:

ad0: FAILURE - SETFEATURES 0x85 status=41<READY,ERROR> error=4<ABORTED>

The error should only appear once at bootup on such systems, and can safely be ignored.

Fatal Errors

The following errors would indicate more serious problems such as a faulty HDD/SSD, faulty cable/controller, a faulty SATA/SD/IDE converter, a device out of space, or other similar condition.

ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=40<UNCORRECTABLE> LBA=3919

ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=207
ad0: WARNING - READ_DMA UDMA ICRC error (retrying request) LBA=207
ad0: FAILURE - READ_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=84<ICRC,ABORTED> LBA=207
g_vfs_done():ad0s1a[READ(offset=65536, length=8192)]error = 5

ad0: FAILURE - WRITE_DMA status=51<READY,DSC,ERROR> error=4<ABORTED> dma=0x06 LBA=1129359

Other Errors

The following errors have been observed on certain hardware platforms running pfSense software. While they do not appear to be fatal, the cause appears to be a disk driver issue in FreeBSD (9.2 and later) and it may degrade performance. If these errors are encountered, attempt to reproduce the problem with a stock FreeBSD 10.1 or later installation and report the problem directly to FreeBSD.

(ada0:ata0:0:1:0): READ_DMA. ACB: c8 00 3f 95 07 40 00 00 00 00 08 00
(ada0:ata0:0:1:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error
(ada0:ata0:0:1:0): ATA status: ff (BSY DRDY DF SERV DRQ CORR IDX ERR), error: 00 ()
(ada0:ata0:0:1:0): RES: ff 00 46 95 07 00 00 00 00 00 00
(ada0:ata0:0:1:0): Retrying command

(ada0:ata0:0:1:0): WRITE_DMA. ACB: ca 00 ef e8 1a 40 00 00 00 00 08 00
(ada0:ata0:0:1:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error
(ada0:ata0:0:1:0): ATA status: ff (BSY DRDY DF SERV DRQ CORR IDX ERR), error: 00 ()
(ada0:ata0:0:1:0): RES: ff 00 ef e8 1a 00 00 00 00 08 00
(ada0:ata0:0:1:0): Retrying command

This appears to further be limited to onboard CF-to-SATA sockets. Using another disk type (mSATA, SATA, etc) may also be a viable workaround.