Re: Serial console stuck during boot, unblocked with xl debug-key

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>]

On 29.12.2023 10:50, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This is continuation from matrix chat. There is an occasional failure on
> qubes-hw2 gitlab runner that console become stuck during boot. I can now
> reproduce it _much_ more often on another system, and the serial console output
> ends with:
> 
>     (XEN) Allocated console ring of 256 KiB.
>     (XEN) Using HWP for cpufreq
>     (XEN) mwait-idle: does not run on family 6
> 
> It should be:
> 
>     (XEN) Allocated console ring of 256 KiB.
>     (XEN) Using HWP for cpufreq
>     (XEN) mwait-idle: does not run on family 6 model 183
>     (XEN) VMX: Supported advanced features:
>     (XEN)  - APIC MMIO access virtualisation
>     (XEN)  - APIC TPR shadow
>     ...
> 
> 
> Otherwise the system works perfectly fine, the logs are available in
> full via `xl dmesg` etc. Doing (any?) `xl debug-key` unblocks the
> console and missing logs gets dumped there too. I narrowed it down to
> the serial console tx buffer and collected some info with the attacked
> patch (it collects info still during boot, after the place where it
> usually breaks). When it works, I get:
> 
>     (XEN) SERIAL DEBUG: txbufc: 0x5b5, txbufp: 0x9f7, uart intr_works: 1, serial_txbufsz: 0x4000, tx_ready: 0, lsr_mask: 0x20, msi: 0, io_size: 8, skipped_interrupts: 0
> 
> And when it breaks, I get:
> 
>     (XEN) SERIAL DEBUG: txbufc: 0x70, txbufp: 0x9fd, uart intr_works: 1, serial_txbufsz: 0x4000, tx_ready: 16, lsr_mask: 0x20, msi: 0, io_size: 8, skipped_interrupts: 0

The only meaningful difference is tx_ready then. Looking at
ns16550_tx_ready() I wonder whether the LSR reports inconsistent
values on successive reads (there are at least three separate calls
to the function out of serial_tx_interrupt() alone). What you didn't
log is the LSR value itself; from the tx_ready value one can conclude
though that in the bad case fifo_size was returned, while in the good
case 0 was passed back. At the first glance this looks backwards, or
in other words I can't explain why it would be this way round. (I
assume you've had each case multiple times, and the output was
sufficiently consistent; that doesn't go without saying as your
invocation of serial_debug() is competing with the asynchronous
transmitting of data [if any].) It being this way round might suggest
that we lost an interrupt. Is this a real serial port, or one mimicked
by a BMC (SoL or alike)?

Jan