FreeBSD IPMI driver problem

Eugene Grosbein
Mon, 26 Sep 2011 06:06:35 -0000

Hi!

I use several SuperMicro boxes with intergrated IPMI card.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/5016/SYS-5016T-MTF.cfm

FreeBSD 8.2 sometimes hang in the past after panics so I use IPMI's watchdog
and generally it works nice with 5 minute timeout. The card is detected as
following:

ipmi0: <IPMI System Interface> on isa0
ipmi0: KCS mode found at io 0xca2 alignment 0x1 on isa
ipmi0: IPMI device rev. 1, firmware rev. 1.07, version 2.0
ipmi0: Number of channels 2
ipmi0: Attached watchdog

Sometimes ipmi driver issues "KCS errors" to system logs that I ignore
as they seem harmless. However, one of my boxes suddenly rebooted with watchdog
after following errors written to console:

ipmi0: KCS: Reply address mismatch
ipmi0: KCS error: 01
ipmi0: KCS: Reply address mismatch
ipmi0: KCS error: 01
ipmi0: KCS: Command mismatch
ipmi0: KCS error: 01
ipmi0: KCS: Reply address mismatch
ipmi0: KCS error: 01
ipmi0: KCS: Reply address mismatch
ipmi0: KCS error: 01
ipmi0: KCS: Command mismatch
ipmi0: KCS error: 01
ipmi0: KCS: Reply address mismatch
ipmi0: KCS error: 01
ipmi0: KCS: Reply address mismatch
ipmi0: KCS error: 01
ipmi0: KCS: Reply address mismatch
ipmi0: KCS error: 01
ipmi0: Failed to reset watchdog
ipmi0: KCS: Command mismatch
ipmi0: KCS error: 01

It seems, the driver lost ability to contact IPMI watchdog timer and that was
the reason of reboot.

What can be done to avoid such resets in the future?

Eugene Grosbein