When they mapped checksum mismatches to physical addresses, the correlation was perfect. The controller was occasionally reading its own command descriptors from the same region the DMA was using to stage payload fragments. A race. A hardware-software choreography gone wrong.
At 03:12 the continuous run ticked past a million verified writes without a single checksum mismatch. The red LED breathed back to green. checksum error writing buffer kess v2
She replayed the trip in her head: user-space pushes data -> kernel constructs buffer -> checksum appended -> DMA queued to controller -> controller executes write to flash -> readback verification. At which point in that elegant pipeline could bits change their minds? When they mapped checksum mismatches to physical addresses,