Re: [Intel-wired-lan] [PATCH] igb: use igb_adapter->io_addr instead of e1000_hw->hw_addr

From: Corinna Vinschen
Date: Tue Nov 08 2016 - 13:37:46 EST


On Nov 8 09:16, Hisashi T Fujinaka wrote:
> On Tue, 8 Nov 2016, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > On Nov 8 15:06, Cao jin wrote:
> > > When running as guest, under certain condition, it will oops as following.
> > > writel() in igb_configure_tx_ring() results in oops, because hw->hw_addr
> > > is NULL. While other register access won't oops kernel because they use
> > > wr32/rd32 which have a defense against NULL pointer.
> > > [...]
> >
> > Incidentally we're just looking for a solution to that problem too.
> > Do three patches to fix the same problem at rougly the same time already
> > qualify as freak accident?
> >
> > FTR, I attached my current patch, which I was planning to submit after
> > some external testing.
> >
> > However, all three patches have one thing in common: They workaround
> > a somewhat dubious resetting of the hardware address to NULL in case
> > reading from a register failed.
> >
> > That makes me wonder if setting the hardware address to NULL in
> > rd32/igb_rd32 is really such a good idea. It's performed in a function
> > which return value is *never* tested for validity in the calling
> > functions and leads to subsequent crashes since no tests for hw_addr ==
> > NULL are performed.
> >
> > Maybe commit 22a8b2915 should be reconsidered? Isn't there some more
> > graceful way to handle the "surprise removal"?
>
> Answering this from my home account because, well, work is Outlook.
>
> "Reconsidering" would be great. In fact, revert if if you'd like. I'm
> uncertain that the surprise removal code actually works the way I
> thought previously and I think I took a lot of it out of my local code.
>
> Unfortuantely I don't have any equipment that I can use to reproduce
> surprise removal any longer so that means I wouldn't be able to test
> anything. I have to defer to you or Cao Jin.

I'm not too keen to rip out a PCIe NIC under power from my locale
desktop machine, but I think an actual surprise removal is not the
problem.

As described in my git log entry, the error condition in igb_rd32 can be
triggered during a suspend. The HW has been put into a sleep state but
some register read requests are apparently not guarded against that
situation. Reading a register in this state returns -1, thus a suspend
is erroneously triggering the "surprise removal" sequence.

Here's a raw idea:

- Note that device is suspended in e1000_hw struct. Don't trigger
error sequence in igb_rd32 if so (...and return a 0 value???)

- Otherwise assume it's actually a surprise removal. In theory that
should somehow trigger a device removal sequence, kind of like
calling igb_remove, no?


Thanks,
Corinna

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