From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-DE; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050922 Fedora/1.0.7-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.7 Description of problem: FC5T1 now finally contains a kernel that supports S.M.A.R.T. command passthru for SATA HDDs via libata. To use this feature the option "-d ata" has to be added to each line in /etc/smartd.conf that lists an SATA HDD otherwise smartd won't start. I've verified the correct behaviour of S.M.A.R.T. command passthru using "smartctl -d ata -a /dev/sda" on my system. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. try to use smartctl / smartd on a SATA HDD 2. 3. Additional info:
Great, do you know of any easy and reliable way how to detect libata devices among the regular SCSI ones?
Hmm, good question. In /proc/scsi/scsi you'll always see "Vendor: ATA". Maybe this helps. I don't know if libata perhaps has more extended interface to /proc were one could get this information.
Also do you know which oldest kernel version is required for this to work?
The functionality seems to be introduced with kernel patch-2.6.15-rc1 which is included in the FC5T1 kernel. I don't know in which rawhide kernel version this first appeared, but it definitely does not work with the latest FC4 errata kernel-2.6.14-1.1637_FC4.
I suppose it could be detected with 'cat /sys/module/libata/version' >= 1.20 However -rc1 patch has probably still 1.12 - the same as 2.6.14. But it shouldn't be a problem as soon as -rc2 is in rawhide.