Floppy problems after long uptime

[Paul Slootman <paul@wau.mis.ah.nl>]

I tried to put something on a floppy last night, and that failed.
In fact, any access failed (reading, writing, formatting, ...).

I looked a bit closer to the messages given, and a sample is:

Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: floppy driver state 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: ------------------- 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: now=2655075170 last interrupt=-1639977453 last called handler=fffffc0000398300 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: timeout_message=lock fdc 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: last output bytes: 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel:  4 80 2654989242 
[...]
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: last result at -1639977453 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: last redo_fd_request at -1639977453 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel:  4  0  0  1  0  1  2  
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: status=80 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: fdc_busy=1 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: fd_timer.function=fffffc000039b3c0 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: cont=fffffc0000410f10 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: CURRENT=0000000000000000 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: command_status=-1 
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel:  
Feb 17 18:53:18 alf kernel: floppy0: floppy timeout called 


The negative numbers made me suspect the worst, confirmed by a look into
the source: jiffies are being stored into "int" values... My uptime was
30 days then (no, I haven't rebooted; I'm waiting to see whether the
problem disappears again after another 30 days :-).

Is the problem _this_ obvious, or am I missing something else?
This is with 2.0.36, but the 2.2.1 source looks very similar.

Note that in the line:
    now=2655075170 last interrupt=-1639977453 ...
if you cast 2655075170 into an int, you get -1639892126.

Paul Slootman
-- 
home: paul@wurtel.demon.nl | work: paul@murphy.nl | debian: paul@debian.org
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