Linux 4.1 To Bring Support For NCQ Autosense

While usually not presenting any major features each release cycle, the libata feature pull request for Linux 4.1 is a bit more interesting this time around.

Catching my interest from the libata 4.1-rc1 pull request by Tejun Heo is the addition of NCQ Autosense support. Hannes Reinecke has implemented NCQ Autosense support from the new ATA command specification (ACS-4).

Hannes explained in his patches, "with ACS-4 ATA drives inherited the possibility to return SCSI sense codes, allowing for a more precise error handling. Not to mention a nice alignment with the SCSI error handling. This patchset implements both, support for NCQ Autosense and the sense data reporting feature set."

There's new disk drives out there like the Micron M500 SSD and HGST Ultrastar 7K6000 that currently support NCQ Autosense. This sense data is able to provide more useful information in the case of encountering errors with the disk and now the kernel's libata is able to utilize this information.