It seems cdrwtool in the udftools has been unusable on "modern" kernels
for some time. A Google search reveals many people with the same issue
but no solution (cdrwtool fails to format the disk). After spending some
time tracking down the issue, it comes down to the following:
The udftools still use the older CDROM_SEND_PACKET interface to send
things like FORMAT_UNIT through to the drive. They should really be
updated, but that's another story. Since most distros are using libata
now, the cd or dvd burner appears as a SCSI device, and we wind up in
block/scsi_ioctl.c. Here, the code tries to take the "struct
cdrom_generic_command" and translate it and stuff it into a "struct
sg_io_hdr" structure so it can pass it to the modern sg_io() routine
instead. Unfortunately, there is one error, or rather an omission in the
translation. The timeout that is passed in in the "struct
cdrom_generic_command" is in HZ=100 units, and this is modified and
correctly converted to jiffies by use of clock_t_to_jiffies(). However,
a little further down, this cgc.timeout value in jiffies is simply
copied into the sg_io_hdr timeout, which should be in milliseconds.
Since most modern x86 kernels seems to be getting build with HZ=250, the
timeout that is passed to sg_io and eventually converted to the
timeout_per_command member of the scsi_cmnd structure is now four times
too small. Since cdrwtool tries to set the timeout to one hour for the
FORMAT_UNIT command, and it takes about 20 minutes to format a 4x CDRW,
the SCSI error-handler kicks in after the FORMAT_UNIT completes because
it took longer than the incorrectly-calculated timeout.
[jejb: fix up whitespace]
Signed-off-by: Tim Wright <timw@splhi.com>
Cc: Stable Tree <stable@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
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