netdev - Re: bnx2 cards intermittantly going offline

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Date:	Sun, 16 Sep 2012 04:47:46 +0100
From:	Ben Hutchings <ben@...adent.org.uk>
To:	Sven Ulland <sveniu@...ra.com>
Cc:	netdev@...r.kernel.org, "Marc A. Donges" <marc.donges@...d1.de>,
	Michael Chan <mchan@...adcom.com>
Subject: Re: bnx2 cards intermittantly going offline

On Thu, 2012-09-13 at 17:45 +0200, Sven Ulland wrote:
> On 09/13/2012 03:51 PM, Marc A. Donges wrote:
> > After 55 days of operation the machine (A) suddenly was no longer
> > reachable via network. Strangely, a second machine (B) that should
> > take over the IP addresses (keepalived) did not take over. Only
> > after shutting the switchport to which A is attached did B take
> > over.
> 
> Hi. We've had the same symptom with our BCM5709S [14e4:163a] on
> Debian. Like you, we were on stable's 2.6.32-41squeeze2. Google led us
> to many similar issues [1,2,3]. They concluded with the fix being in
> mainline commit c441b8d2 [4]: "bnx2: Fix lost MSI-X problem on 5709
> NICs".
>
> Broadcom: Can you publish a tool that decodes ethtool -d dumps to make
> debugging easier, or do you deem it no longer necessary with the the
> register dump commits in 555069da?

This tool should be ethtool itself (it includes dump decoders for many
drivers).

> Now, Debian's 2.6.32-41squeeze2 is based on longterm release 2.6.32.54
> [5]. That version includes commit 0b7817ed [6], which is a backport of
> the already mentioned mainline commit c441b8d2.
>
> So we tried digging further and applying some seemingly relevant
> commits [7,8] to our 2.6.32, but without any change in behaviour. Our
> temporary fix was to run 'ethtool -t ethX' to reset the device every
> time it locked up.
> 
> This dragged on with various builds, until we ended up on mainline
> 2.6.38 where we no longer saw any symptoms. I don't know in which
> kernel version it was fixed, but we ended up on that one, sort of by
> chance. Unfortunately, it had severe issues with kswapd memory
> compaction causing CPU soft lockups [9], so we went straight to
> squeeze-backports' 3.2.23-1~bpo60+2. We've been happy since then.
>
> > We have five pairs of basically identical machines performing the
> > same task (each pair for one site). The error has not occured with
> > any other one, but this site is the busiest:
> 
> We also saw the issue only at a site with generally higher load
> compared to other sites.
> 
> I'd love to know exactly which commit fixed the issue, but it's fairly
> tricky to reproduce the issue, and the bisect count is fairly high (it
> need not be a specific fix for bnx2).

I don't see any changes to the driver itself that look relevant.
Perhaps this was a firmware bug?

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones.

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