Summary: | smart properties and test results should be visible and notify the user | ||
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Product: | [Plasma] plasma-disks | Reporter: | Luiz Angelo De Luca <luizluca> |
Component: | general | Assignee: | Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs> |
Status: | RESOLVED DUPLICATE | ||
Severity: | normal | CC: | katyaberezyaka, sitter |
Priority: | NOR | ||
Version: | unspecified | ||
Target Milestone: | --- | ||
Platform: | Other | ||
OS: | Linux | ||
Latest Commit: | Version Fixed In: | ||
Sentry Crash Report: | |||
Attachments: | smart.json |
Description
Luiz Angelo De Luca
2020-11-19 02:44:30 UTC
I'm really not sure how much we'd want to add heuristics on our side. In the end if the status is ok but the disk is not, that is surely a firmware problem. Adding advanced guessing heuristics in plasma means the CLI doesn't benefit from them, which seems distinctly disadvantageous. Can you talk to the smartmontools devs about their thoughts on smartctl's behavior? https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/WikiStart#BugReports In any event please attach the output of `sudo smartctl --all --json /dev/sdb` it's useful test data either way. Created attachment 133453 [details]
smart.json
I wouldn't say it's a firmware problem as some of those errors might be transient. However, the same way smartd reported to logs as errors (in red), kde should notify the user:
Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel changed from 58 to 59
Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 42 to 41
Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], SMART Prefailure Attribute: 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate changed from 117 to 120
Device: /dev/sda [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 41 to 40
Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], 1640 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], 1640 Offline uncorrectable sectors
These last two are in red.
Thanks for the json. KDE is a community. I'm sure we'll not report anything ;) Plasma will, but unfortunately the userbase of Plasma is muuuuch too varied to report that kind of data. The problem with reporting the lines you mention is that 99% of people won't know what they mean or what to do about them which is why we break the entire affair down to a binary state of either everything is grand or everything is not. Which has the disadvantage that potentially failing disks slip under the radar if the overall status says ok even when it isn't. At the same time replicating what smartd already does and tracking report trends to discern problems seems a bit useless given, well, smartd already does just that ^^ We could maybe have a tiny hint icon somewhere in kinfocenter that there were problems in the report data so the user can look at it and/or choose to err on the side of caution and replace the disk. (In reply to Harald Sitter from comment #3) > KDE is a community. I'm sure we'll not report anything ;) > Plasma will, but unfortunately the userbase of Plasma is muuuuch too varied > to report that kind of data. I'm still from the times where kde was a thing, not a community... Old habits die hard. > The problem with reporting the lines you mention is that 99% of people won't > know what they mean or what to do about them which is why we break the > entire affair down to a binary state of either everything is grand or > everything is not. Which has the disadvantage that potentially failing disks > slip under the radar if the overall status says ok even when it isn't. HDD dying process is a little more subtle than "run, I'm gonna explode!". A read error with a msg like "it might be a one time error like a power outage. However, if this error keeps reoccurring, it indicates that part of your data in your HDD is not readable anymore". This is something a user might understand. It could show previous tests or error messages to let the user decide if a new HDD is needed. > At the same time replicating what smartd already does and tracking report > trends to discern problems seems a bit useless given, well, smartd already > does just that ^^ It generates the error log. However, that error will never reach a gui-only user. That's what I'm suggesting: exposing "Hey, a read error happened!" to gui users. If smarttools guys does not have a good heuristic, it is not plasma-disk that will implement one. But plasma-disk could expose and "translate" some errors and let the user decide. > We could maybe have a tiny hint icon somewhere in kinfocenter that there > were problems in the report data so the user can look at it and/or choose to > err on the side of caution and replace the disk. If all last self-tests finished with an error, it should be something to report with a big red flashing icon. Not something subtle inside kinfocenter. You can have smartd send notifications Whoops. Hit save too soon. You could have smartd send notifications to journal and then pick them out via trivial scripting. I really don't think the KCM has a role to play here though. As far as we are concerned there is no nuance. Thats a choice of maintainability of the code as much as the user experience. Either the firmware reports status OK or not. If it is not OK we advise the disk be replaced. If the firmware reports OK but it's not OK then that's a firmware problem same as when the firmware reports not OK but the disk is actually ok. At the same time lower level metrics tracking is something smartd has covered well enough already that I don't see the particular use in replacing that. In particular not as a standard plasma feature. (In reply to Harald Sitter from comment #6) > Whoops. Hit save too soon. You could have smartd send notifications to > journal and then pick them out via trivial scripting. If the user can script that, plasma-disk is just an additional feature. I was thinking about those users that does not know how to do that (and does not even know S.M.A.R.T. exists. If plasma has a tool that reads smart data, it would not make sense to have a new tool to do just the same, but better. A repeated error at the same position would tell the user that if there is info info stored there, it is gone as CRC is not matching. Is it a HW failure? Maybe not. It could be generated by a power outage, and external interference scrambling bits, firmware bug... who knows? As an advanced user, I would look for badblocks, fsck the filesystem or ever recreate the FS. It would be nice if the read error message could identify the affected filepath, offer to run check tools (fsck, badblocks, ....), suggest a backup... plasma-disks is a nice feature for a cli user but it will be the only monitor tool for non-cli plasma users. In my case, I zero-filled the disk and now it is working as usual. However, I don't trust that HDD anymore to store anything important. My filesystem got irrecoverably corrupted and I did a backup and recreated the FS. Merging with a similar report. The arguments here only align with a single one of our design personas. Partitionmanager might have interest in growing more in-depth analytic capabilities, but for core Plasma this is way too far out there to justify the cost of maintaining the code, let alone writing it. There are entire continents of work between what the software currently does and what you'd like it to do. It also doesn't really fit the design philosophy here. We actually want the information to be awkwardly high level because we want everyone to have a sense of what to do next without making their eyes glaze over, and then potentially steer them towards more specialized software to take next steps. e.g. backup data with kup, inspect the disk in detail in partitionmanager I appreciate that there is a market for further monitoring and diagnostic capabilities, just not in plasma-disks, not right now anyway. That being said, the fact that we ignore indication of problems needs to be dealt with, that's what the other bug is about. The actual analytics component of what is wrong I'd rather see outsourced to another piece of software. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 429804 *** |