Re: [PATCH v2] ipmi: looped device detection

[Patrick Venture]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2018 at 2:37 PM Corey Minyard <tcminyard@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 09/18/2018 01:42 PM, Patrick Venture wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 3:54 PM Patrick Venture <venture@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 3:10 PM Corey Minyard <minyard@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>> On 09/11/2018 05:56 PM, Patrick Venture wrote:
> >>>> Try to get the device ID repeatedly during initialization before giving up.
> >>>> The BMC isn't always responsive, and this allows it to be slightly flaky
> >>>> during early boot.
> >>>>
> >>>> Tested: Installed on a system with the BMC software disabled
> >>>> such that it was non-responsive.  The driver correctly detected this
> >>>> and gave up as expected.  Then I re-enabled the BMC software unloaded
> >>>> and reloaded the driver and it was detected properly.
> >>> The patch looks fine, but I wonder if this is something that is really
> >>> valuable.
> >>> I have wondered about this before.
> >>>
> >>> The question is: If the BMC is unavailable, what are the chances of it
> >>> becoming
> >>> available by the time you do 5 attempts?  I would guess that is a pretty
> >>> small
> >>> chance, which is why I haven't done this already.
> > Friendly ping.  I'd like to get a sense of whether you're likely to
> > accept this.  If not, it's fine, will close out patch in current
> > downstream rebase.
>
> I'm ok with doing this, but I lied about the patch being fine, there are
> some issue.
> Well, I didn't lie, but I didn't look closely enough.
>
> Can you use dev_xxx() instead of pr_xxx().  I know the driver isn't
> currently
> consistent, but there are a number of patches I have pending to make it
> better and it's a longer-term goal.

Ack.

>
> Can you make GET_DEVICE_ID_ATTEMPTS more specific, add IPMI_SI_ to
> the beginning or something.

Ack.

>
> I am not sure that I'm ok with waiting up to 1.25 seconds in the init
> function.
> As I mentioned before, a large number of systems have broken ACPI/SMBIOS
> information, and for those it will add 1.25 seconds to the boot time of
> every
> one of those systems.  That won't make me a popular guy :-).

Yeah, that's problematic for the systems that'll never get a valid
response.  I don't think it makes sense to gate the feature with a
configuration option, do you?

>
> This is a harder problem to figure out what to do.  To solve it properly
> would
> mean having a timer or thread drive this, and unload the module later if
> the process fails.
>
> -corey
>
> > Thanks
> >
> >> This patch was actually critical for us to provide a reliable IPMI
> >> interface.  The version of OpenBMC or the state of the BMC at the
> >> point the kernel was loading was flaky, so following the example in
> >> the BIOS source, we just re-try a few times.  We also can hold boot X
> >> seconds until it's responding, but, this avoided some issues inherent
> >> with that.
> >>
> >>> You could have something that re-tested periodically, but there are so many
> >>> systems with IPMI specified in ACPI or SMBIOS that is wrong, and it would
> >>> try forever.  Also not really a good thing.
> >> If we did a periodic check, it could check X times, but I felt going
> >> for a simple solution was ideal -- and this idea was proved out on a
> >> few platforms.  We have other drivers that are loaded by the kernel
> >> (not at run-time) and they depend on IPMI, and without this patch they
> >> would then have a non-trivial probability of failure.
> >>
> >>> So I've left it to reload the driver or use the hotmod interface.
> >>>
> >>> -corey
> >>>
> >>>> Signed-off-by: Patrick Venture <venture@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >>>> ---
> >>>> v2:
> >>>>    - removed extra variable that was set but not used.
> >>>> ---
> >>>>    drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_si_intf.c | 23 ++++++++++++++++++++++-
> >>>>    1 file changed, 22 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> >>>>
> >>>> diff --git a/drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_si_intf.c b/drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_si_intf.c
> >>>> index 90ec010bffbd..5fed96897fe8 100644
> >>>> --- a/drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_si_intf.c
> >>>> +++ b/drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi_si_intf.c
> >>>> @@ -1918,11 +1918,13 @@ int ipmi_si_add_smi(struct si_sm_io *io)
> >>>>     * held, primarily to keep smi_num consistent, we only one to do these
> >>>>     * one at a time.
> >>>>     */
> >>>> +#define GET_DEVICE_ID_ATTEMPTS       5
> >>>>    static int try_smi_init(struct smi_info *new_smi)
> >>>>    {
> >>>>        int rv = 0;
> >>>>        int i;
> >>>>        char *init_name = NULL;
> >>>> +     unsigned long sleep_rm;
> >>>>
> >>>>        pr_info(PFX "Trying %s-specified %s state machine at %s address 0x%lx, slave address 0x%x, irq %d\n",
> >>>>                ipmi_addr_src_to_str(new_smi->io.addr_source),
> >>>> @@ -2003,7 +2005,26 @@ static int try_smi_init(struct smi_info *new_smi)
> >>>>         * Attempt a get device id command.  If it fails, we probably
> >>>>         * don't have a BMC here.
> >>>>         */
> >>>> -     rv = try_get_dev_id(new_smi);
> >>>> +     for (i = 0; i < GET_DEVICE_ID_ATTEMPTS; i++) {
> >>>> +             pr_info(PFX "Attempting to read BMC device ID\n");
> >>>> +             rv = try_get_dev_id(new_smi);
> >>>> +             /* If it succeeded, stop trying */
> >>>> +             if (!rv)
> >>>> +                     break;
> >>>> +
> >>>> +             /* Sleep for ~0.25s before trying again instead of hammering
> >>>> +              * the BMC.
> >>>> +              */
> >>>> +             sleep_rm = msleep_interruptible(250);
> >>>> +             if (sleep_rm != 0) {
> >>>> +                     pr_info(PFX "Find BMC interrupted\n");
> >>>> +                     rv = -EINTR;
> >>>> +                     goto out_err;
> >>>> +             }
> >>>> +     }
> >>>> +
> >>>> +     /* If we exited the loop above and rv is non-zero we ran out of tries.
> >>>> +      */
> >>>>        if (rv) {
> >>>>                if (new_smi->io.addr_source)
> >>>>                        dev_err(new_smi->io.dev,
> >>>
>