Re: Serious AMD-Vi(?) issue

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 27.03.2024 18:27, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2024 at 02:43:44PM -0700, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 25, 2024 at 08:55:56AM +0100, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>> On 22.03.2024 20:22, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Mar 22, 2024 at 04:41:45PM +0000, Kelly Choi wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I can see you've recently engaged with our community with some issues 
>>>>> you'd
>>>>> like help with.
>>>>> We love the fact you are participating in our project, however, our
>>>>> developers aren't able to help if you do not provide the specific details.
>>>>
>>>> Please point to specific details which have been omitted.  Fairly little
>>>> data has been provided as fairly little data is available.  The primary
>>>> observation is large numbers of:
>>>>
>>>> (XEN) AMD-Vi: IO_PAGE_FAULT: DDDD:bb:dd.f d0 addr ffffff???????000 flags 
>>>> 0x8 I
>>>>
>>>> Lines in Xen's ring buffer.
>>>
>>> Yet this is (part of) the problem: By providing only the messages that 
>>> appear
>>> relevant to you, you imply that you know that no other message is in any way
>>> relevant. That's judgement you'd better leave to people actually trying to
>>> investigate. Unless of course you were proposing an actual code change, with
>>> suitable justification.
>>
>> Honestly, I forgot about the very small number of messages from the SATA
>> subsystem.  The question of whether the current mitigation actions are
>> effective right now was a bigger issue.  As such monitoring `xl dmesg`
>> was a priority to looking at SATA messages which failed to reliably
>> indicate status.
>>
>> I *thought* I would be able to retrieve those via other slow means, but a
>> different and possibly overlapping issue has shown up.  Unfortunately
>> this means those are no longer retrievable.   :-(
> 
> With some persistence I was able to retrieve them.  There are other
> pieces of software with worse UIs than Xen.
> 
>>> In fact when running into trouble, the usual course of action would be to
>>> increase verbosity in both hypervisor and kernel, just to make sure no
>>> potentially relevant message is missed.
>>
>> More/better information might have been obtained if I'd been engaged
>> earlier.
> 
> This is still true, things are in full mitigation mode and I'll be
> quite unhappy to go back with experiments at this point.

Well, it very likely won't work without further experimenting by someone
able to observe the bad behavior. Recall we're on xen-devel here; it is
kind of expected that without clear (and practical) repro instructions
experimenting as well as info collection will remain with the reporter.

> I now see why I left those out.  The messages from the SATA subsystem
> were from a kernel which a bad patch had leaked into a LTS branch.  Looks
> like the SATA subsystem was significantly broken and I'm unsure whether
> any useful information could be retrieved.  Notably there is quite a bit
> of noise from SATA devices not effected by this issue.
> 
> Some of the messages /might/ be useful, but the amount of noise is quite
> high.  Do messages from a broken kernel interest you?

If this was a less vague (in terms of possible root causes) issue, I'd
probably have answered "yes". But in the case here I'm afraid such might
further confuse things rather than clarifying them.

Jan