It’s not often getting to talk about hard drives on Phoronix these days, but there’s an important fix merged to the Linux 6.19 kernel today ahead of Linux 6.19-rc2. If you happen to be using a Seagate ST2000DM008 Barracuda 2TB HDD, an important fix was merged to avoid it taking down the systems’ SATA bus and/or potentially other issues.
A kernel.org bug report was opened two months ago over the SATA bus going offline with newer versions of the Linux kernel. Post-6.15 kernels, the useer would find their SATA bus going offline that contains multiple SATA SSDs and an HDD as well as there being one NVMe drive on the system. Two months and 40+ bug comments later, the issue of the SATA bus going offline after a while was finally sorted out. It was all caused by a problematic Seagate HDD.
The Seagate ST2000DM008 turns out to have some issues with its Link Power Management (LPM) handling that turns out can cause the entire SATA bus to go down on newer versions of the Linux kernel. Disabling Link Power Management for this specific drive fixes the issues for the entire system around its Serial ATA bus loss.
The Seagate ST2000DM008 is a 2TB 7200RPM HDD that retails for around $70 USD.
Thus merged today is a one-liner to disable LPM for the specific Seagate model ST2000DM008-2FR102 to avoid these problems. Besides upgrading/patching your kernel if having this particular model or a similar Seagate HDD that may be the same/similar issue, the “nolpm” module option can also be used for force-disabling Link Power Management to test the system behavior.
