Bug 57293

Summary: Should not forcibly enable SMART
Product: libatasmart Reporter: David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) <zeuthen>
Component: libraryAssignee: Lennart Poettering <lennart>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Lennart Poettering <lennart>
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium CC: bombo, zeuthen
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: Other   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description David Zeuthen (not reading bugmail) 2012-11-19 20:47:47 UTC 
Several users have requested that the OS don't poll SMART data (either because the firmware in the drive or bridge is broken) and I think such a thing is reasonable to support. I also think the best way to do this is simply to disable SMART on the drive [1] because that way we don't need configuration files or udev rules. This way, the subsystem responsible for polling (udisks) simply just avoids polling SMART data if SMART is disabled. I've added support for this in udisks and GNOME Disks, see

 http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-disable-enable-smart.png

However, it seems that libatasmart is forcibly enabling SMART. While this is not a huge problem (udisks won't call into libatasmart for such disks) but I still think it's wrong to do. Please stop forcibly enabling SMART operations. Thanks!

[1] :as per the ATA spec, the setting is guaranteed to be stored in NVRAM of the drive
Comment 1 Robert Omb 2015-11-11 16:46:48 UTC 
Is this related to https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58007 ?

udisks seems to try the polling even if SMART is disabled (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58007#c8)

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