skiboot-6.0.4

skiboot 6.0.4 was released on Monday May 28th, 2018. It replaces skiboot-6.0.3 as the current stable release in the 6.0.x series.

It is recommended that 6.0.4 be used instead of any previous 6.0.x version.

Over skiboot-6.0.3, we have two bug fixes: one helps with performance (especially in HPC environments), and one is an opal-prd fix.

Changes are:

  • SLW: Remove stop1_lite and stop2_lite

    stop1_lite has been removed since it adds no additional benefit over stop0_lite. stop2_lite has been removed since currently it adds minimal benefit over stop2. However, the benefit is eclipsed by the time required to ungate the clocks

    Moreover, Lite states don’t give up the SMT resources, can potentially have a performance impact on sibling threads.

    Since current OSs (Linux) aren’t smart enough to make good decisions with these stop states, we’re (temporarly) removing them from what we expose to the OS, the idea being to bring them back in a new DT representation so that only an OS that knows what to do will do things with them.

  • opal-prd: Do not error out on first failure for soft/hard offline.

    The memory errors (CEs and UEs) that are detected as part of background memory scrubbing are reported by PRD asynchronously to opal-prd along with affected memory ranges. hservice_memory_error() converts these ranges into page granularity before hooking up them to soft/hard offline-ing infrastructure.

    But the current implementation of hservice_memory_error() does not hookup all the pages to soft/hard offline-ing if any of the page offline action fails. e.g hard offline can fail for:

    • Pages that are not part of buddy managed pool.

    • Pages that are reserved by kernel using memblock_reserved()

    • Pages that are in use by kernel.

    But for the pages that are in use by user space application, the hard offline marks the page as hwpoison, sends SIGBUS signal to kill the affected application as recovery action and returns success.

    Hence, It is possible that some of the pages in that memory range are in use by application or free. By stopping on first error we loose the opportunity to hwpoison the subsequent pages which may be free or in use by application. This patch fixes this issue.