Re: [RFC PATCH] pci: Proof of concept at fixing pci_enable_device/bridge races

[Guenter Roeck <linux@roeck-us.net>]

On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 09:38:41AM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Wed, 2018-08-15 at 15:40 -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 16, 2018 at 07:50:13AM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > > (Resent with lkml on copy)
> > > 
> > > [Note: This isn't meant to be merged, it need splitting at the very
> > > least, see below]
> > > 
> > > This is something I cooked up quickly today to test if that would fix
> > > my problems with large number of switch and NVME devices on POWER.
> > > 
> > 
> > Is that a problem that can be reproduced with a qemu setup ?
> 
> With difficulty... mt-tcg might help, but you need a rather large
> systems to reproduce it.
> 
> My repro-case is a 2 socket POWER9 system (about 40 cores off the top
> of my mind, so 160 threads) with 72 NVME devices underneath a tree of
> switches (I don't have the system at hand today to check how many).
> 
> It's possible to observe it I suppose on a smaller system (in theory a
> single bridge with 2 devices is enough) but in practice the timing is
> extremely hard to hit.
> 
> You need a combination of:
> 
>   - The bridges come up disabled (which is the case when Linux does the
> resource assignment, such as on POWER but not on x86 unless it's
> hotplug)
> 
>   - The nvme devices try to enable them simultaneously
> 
> Also the resulting error is a UR, I don't know how well qemu models
> that.
> 
Not well enough, apparently. I tried for a while, registering as many
nvme drives as the system would take, but I was not able to reproduce
the problem with qemu. It was worth a try, though.

Guenter