The Power9 host booting problem with OpenBMC kernel 5.7.x

[Joel Stanley]

On Mon, 10 Aug 2020 at 18:48, Alexander A. Filippov
<a.filippov at yadro.com> wrote:
>
> Since the kernel in OpenBMC was updated to 5.7.x we have a problem with the P9
> hosts booting.
> On host with one Power9 CPU the failure happens during the Petitboot is trying
> to initialize the network and it leads to host restarts.
> On host with two Power9 CPU the same failure happens during OS booting. It
> increases boot time, but at the end the host OS is completely started.

Oh no. I have spent some time testing the 5.7 tree primarily on
Tacoma, our ast2600/p9 platform. We saw some strange systemd failures,
where services such as udevd and journald would be killed by systemd's
watchdog functionality. I did some preliminary debugging but didn't
find a root cause.

I have since published a 5.8 based tree that does not suffer from this
issue. Could you give that a spin on your hardware and see if it
recreates your issue?

 https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/c/openbmc/meta-aspeed/+/35315

> So, I have two questions:
> - Could you please, check if Romulus is also affected by this issue?
> - Do you have any idea what is going wrong?

I'll fire up a romulus and see if it reproduces.

My guess is it's something to do with the timekeeping, irq or rcu
code. All areas of complexity!

Thanks for the report.

Cheers,

Joel

> I've attached the tarball with full logs.
> - poopsy is a system with two Power9 CPU
> - whoopsy is a system with one Power9 CPU
>
> --
> Regards,
> Alexander