[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Device error handling / reporting / isolation

[James Bottomley]

On Thu, 2014-05-08 at 13:37 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> I'd like to have a discussion about handling device errors.
> 
> IOMMUs are becoming more common, and we've seen some failure modes where
> we just end up with an endless stream of fault reports from a given
> device, and the kernel can do nothing else.

This is when the addresses being sent by the bus don't have IOTLB
entries?

> We may have various options for shutting it up — a PCI function level
> reset, power cycling the offending device, or maybe just configuring the
> IOMMU to *ignore* further errors from it, which would at least let the
> system get on with doing something useful (and if we do, when do we
> re-enable reporting?).
> 
> But I absolutely don't want us to be implementing policies like that in
> an individual IOMMU driver; this needs to be handled by generic device
> code. Once upon a time I might have said PCI code, but this is actually
> relevant for non-PCI devices too.

Right, with my PARISC hat on, our IOMMUs sit adjacent to the CPUs.  The
PCI busses (if we have any) are a couple of layers down.

> I want the IOMMU to report errors, and let the system do the appropriate
> thing. Which requires some discussion about what the "appropriate thing"
> can be in various circumstances, and indeed what options are available
> to us on various platforms.
> 
> Participants would be those working with IOMMUs on various platforms,
> including Jörg Rödel, myself, and hopefully someone with a fairly
> intimate knowledge of EEH as used on POWER systems.
> 
> We probably also want KVM folks to weigh in on how, if at all, they'd
> want errors on assigned devices to be reported to guests.
> 
> I strongly suspect that once we start looking at it, we'll find other
> triggers than "IOMMU faults" for starting to isolate and reset
> misbehaving devices. Interrupt storms perhaps being one of them — we've
> never been particularly robust to those, either.

I'd be interested ... if just to make sure that whatever's agreed to
isn't just intel IOMMU centric.

James