Passthrough of Raid Controller to KVM guest results in NMI and unresponsiveness on host

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1

Situation

The KVM host server has one or more KVM guests configured with passthrough raid controllers
The KVM guests configured with passthrough raid controllers has resulted in NMI and an unresponsive KVM host.

Resolution

An update of the kernel fixes this issue. Update to the kernel listed below or newer.

kernel 4.12.14-197.18

Cause

A bug in kernel 4.12.14-197.15 caused this to fail in certain cases.

Additional Information

One possible cause of this issue is when the guest driver kicks in and the device is in some low-power state this might cause a PCI error and the NMI.

The below commit, which was included in the newer version of the kernel, provides fixes for Linux to determine power states of PCI devices.

PCI: PM/ACPI: Refresh all stale power state data in pci_pm_complete() (bsc#1149106).

(Upstream commit-id is b51033e06c2ebbad322370f4a35c84488e61b342)

This commit confirms that Linux has the right picture about the power states of PCI devices. It could be the case that Linux' information about the power state of the LSI controller is wrong after the host driver is unloaded and the device attached to VFIO to pass it to the guest.

Disclaimer

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