RE: [Xen-devel] Xen 4.0.0-rc7 problem/hang with vt-d DMAR parsing

["Cui, Dexuan" <dexuan.cui@xxxxxxxxx>]

Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 09:52:45AM +0800, Cui, Dexuan wrote:
>> Pasi K?rkk?inen wrote:
>>> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 07:54:33PM +0000, Keir Fraser wrote:
>>>> On 23/03/2010 19:37, "Pasi Kärkkäinen" <pasik@xxxxxx> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>>> It's not impossible that the BIOS VT-d support is just broken (I
>>>>>> assume you've never tested VT-d on this particular type of system
>>>>>> before).
>>>>> 
>>>>> Yeah, I've never used VT-d on this system earlier, so it could
>>>>> just be broken BIOS. I guess Xen still shouldn't hang on it?
>>>> 
>>>> We'd prefer to gracefully disable VT-d.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 4.0.0-rc7 (without any extra cmdline options) does disable vt-d and
>>> boot ok, after 'hanging' for 30 seconds while parsing the DMAR
>>> tables. 
>>> 
>>> If I add "iommu=verbose" option for Xen, then it'll print huge
>>> amount of stuff like I pasted earlier.. and it takes forever to
>>> print all that. 
>>> 
>>> Hmm.. wondering if the patch Jan just sent will help with that.
>>> Sounds like it might help :)
>> I guess Jan's patch helps here in a very interesting way:
>> I suspect your BIOS doesn't construct the DMAR properly, e.g., in
>> acpi_parse_dmar(),  entry_header->length is always 0, so xen'll hang
>> in the while loop and continue printing the "dmaru->address = 0"
>> message when iommu=verbose. Without verbose message outputing, the
>> loop runs even faster and in acpi_parse_one_drhd(),  xmalloc(struct
>> acpi_drhd_unit) would NULL in a short periof of time and hence VT-d
>> is got disabled... :-)     
>> 
>> Please dump your DMAR table using the 'acpudump' utility in *native
>> Linux*: # wget
>> http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/lenb/acpi/utils/pmtools-20100123.tar.gz
>> # tar zxf pmtools-20100123.tar.gz # cd pmtools-20100123/acpidump &&
>> make && ./acpidump --table DMAR -b > dmar.bin 
>> Please attach the dmar.bin so we can double check.
>> 
> 
> Here it is (as an attachment).
> 
> Xen 4.0.0-rc8 works properly now, meaning it disables VT-d immediately
> without delays.
> 
> Motherboard: Supermicro X7SB4
> BIOS: v1.2a
> 
> -- Pasi

With "iasl -d Supermicro-X7SB4-BIOS12a-dmar.bin", we can easily confirm the 
BIOS is broken.
Please check if there is newer BIOS available.

Thanks,
-- Dexuan
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