PCI error recovery for the Emulex LPFC

Hi James,

I recently started fiddling with the emulex lpfc driver with the idea of adding PCI error recovery support to the driver. I'm trying to figure out how to proceed.

Some background: In IBM pSeries, and now newer PCI-E based systems, things like parity errors, etc. on the PCI bus are detected by the PCI bridge chip, which then freezes all further traffic to the adapter. When an error condition is detected, there's a handful of callbacks made to the device driver, which can then try to recover from the error, and move forward.

When io is frozen, mmio reads return all 0xffff's ... I injected an error on the lpfc, and the (so far, completely unmodified) driver promptly crashed on me:

0:mon> excp
cpu 0x0: Vector: 300 (Data Access) at [c0000003fbed3890]

    pc: d000000000aa23c0: .lpfc_dev_loss_tmo_callbk+0x68/0x238 [lpfc]
    lr: c0000000002e9dac: .fc_starget_delete+0x90/0x17c
    sp: c0000003fbed3b10
   msr: 9000000000009032
   dar: 6b6b6b6b6b6b7753
 dsisr: 40000000
  current = 0xc0000003fa4ac7f0
  paca    = 0xc000000000523300
    pid   = 4714, comm = fc_wq_1

0:mon> t
[c0000003fbed3bf0] c0000000002e9dac .fc_starget_delete+0x90/0x17c [c0000003fbed3c80] c0000000002ebc5c .fc_rport_final_delete+0x80/0x124 [c0000003fbed3d20] c000000000067268 .run_workqueue+0xdc/0x168 [c0000003fbed3dc0] c000000000067d0c .worker_thread+0x140/0x1b0 [c0000003fbed3ee0] c00000000006c24c .kthread+0x124/0x174 [c0000003fbed3f90] c000000000024d20 .kernel_thread+0x4c/0x68

This is on 2.6.19-rc1-git11 -- I'll try to track this down further, but thought I'd mention it now. Does sucha crash look familiar?

-- Linas Vepstas

Linas,

I don't know of anything in this area.
I also need a deeper understand of what the error was, and how, that was injected. This play into it.

Also, PCI error recovery is not a simple task. There are many aspects to the adapter messaging interface and the affects of the PCI error recovery scheme that has to be closely looked at. DMA errors can be very fatal, even if the PCI bus survives. In many cases, the only safe recovery is a hard adapter reset (with little to no interaction with the adapter to clean up). We can discuss this more offline if you'd like.

-- james s

When the PCI slot is frozen, the PCI bridge will block all writes to the device, and will return all 0xffffffff for reads. All DMA will be prevented from going through.

I've implemented it for the ipr and symbios SCSI controllers, and for the e100, e1000, ixgb and s2io ethernet cards. If you revew the actual code, you will see its fairly tiny. Mostly I've discovered that if the device driver has clean, clear-cut device-up/device-down routines, then recovery is straightforward.

FWIW, I've run some of the kernels & devices through 48-hour runs with thousands of errors injected and successfully recovered from.

Currently, all of the device drivers I mention above perform the recovery with a hard reset. The generic API does not require this, but this seems to be the simplest, most robust/reliable route. I experimeted with non-hard-reset on the s2io, which I got "almost working". I don't know that its worth the trouble.

Just to be clear, I'm refering to the infrastructure documented in Documentation/pci-error-recovery.txt

--linas