V9.2-2 Unable to read registers on I/O card

[mark.foster]

I’m running VMS x86_64 V9.2-2 on a VMware virtual machine on a host running ESXi 6.7.0. I have 2 PCIe arcnet cards on the host that are configured with VMDirectPath for the virtual machine. VMS on the virtual machine can see both cards. I have a custom driver for the cards, and I can successfully use ‘sysman io connect’ to create VMS devices for the cards. However, whenever the driver calls ioc$read_io to read the cards’ registers, it always gets a status of 1 from ioc$read_io with a data value of 0xFF.

Should I be able to read the cards’ registers in VMS V9.2-2? I know the release notes say user drivers are not supported, but I’d like to go as far as I can in getting the driver to work.

Mark Foster
TMEIC Corporation Americas

[roberbrooks]

> Should I be able to read the cards’ registers in VMS V9.2-2?
> I know the release notes say user drivers are not supported, but I’d like to
> go as far as I can in getting the driver to work.

There is nothing that explicitly prohibits user drivers from working.

I assume you've written port drivers before?

I'll run this past a few folks on Wednesday.

[sms]

Code: Select all

> [...] I have a custom driver for the cards, [...]

   Debugging invisible code can be difficult.  Knowing nothing about the
device doesn't help much, either.

[mark.foster]

> Should I be able to read the cards’ registers in VMS V9.2-2?
> I know the release notes say user drivers are not supported, but I’d like to
> go as far as I can in getting the driver to work.

There is nothing that explicitly prohibits user drivers from working.

I assume you've written port drivers before?

I'll run this past a few folks on Wednesday.

> I assume you've written port drivers before?
Yes, I ported this driver from VAX to Alpha, and then ported it to Itanium. It's been over 10 years, though.

> I'll run this past a few folks on Wednesday.
Thanks

[pocketprobe]

There are others on this forum who had ethernet adapters passed through when using KVM as a hypervisor which were working fineviewtopic.php?f=21&t=8991, and VSI is planning on supporting VMDirectPath for Fiber Channel at some point. I am curious about the card and/or driver. I too run a configuration that is unsupported (Bare Metal)

[mark.foster]

There are others on this forum who had ethernet adapters passed through when using KVM as a hypervisor which were working fineviewtopic.php?f=21&t=8991, and VSI is planning on supporting VMDirectPath for Fiber Channel at some point. I am curious about the card and/or driver. I too run a configuration that is unsupported (Bare Metal)

Thanks for the info.

The card is a Contemporary Controls PCI20EX Arcnet card. The driver is a custom one originally written in the mid 90's, modified around 2000 for Alpha and modified again around 2005 for Itanium.

[pjacobi]

I suspect that there is a wrong parameter on the IO CONNECT command which is associating your driver to the wrong bus. You might be able to use SDA> CLUE CONFIG to obtain the correct parameter, however it is still going to be difficult to determine the correct parameters.

Autoconfigure is a much simpler way to load your driver because it automatically figures out all of the complicated parameters. Look in SYS$SYSTEM:SYS$CONFIG.DAT for examples and add an entry for your driver. In the example below, you will need to change the PCI Vendor ID (0x8086/Intel) to the Vendor ID of your device and replace XXXX with the Device ID.

device = "Your driver"
name = ZZ
driver = SYS$ZZDRIVER
adapter = PCI
id = 0xXXXX8086
end_device


Be sure the adapter parameter matches the bus (PCI/PCIE) as reported in CLUE CONFIG or UEFI Shell>pci command. Some Hypervisors configure physical PCIE devices as virtual PCI devices in pass-through mode!

To edit SYS$CONFIG.DAT, copy the file from the memory disk LDMxxxx:[VMS$COMMON.SYSEXE]SYS$CONFIG.DAT to a local disk, edit the file with a text editor, then COPY/LOG back to the memory disk and verify a new version of the file was created. If you run out of space on the memory disk, purge the file or use COPY/OVERLAY.

Use of SYS$CONFIG.DAT is OK for debug, but you will eventually want to put your device entry in SYS$USER_CONFIG.DAT which is preserved on VMS upgrades.

Copy driver executable to SYS$LOADABLE_IMAGES:

Reboot the system, stop in SYSBOOT and set NOAUTO=1. Continue the boot process for a minimally configure system. If your driver had previously crashed, delete the file from SYS$LOADABLE_IMAGES.

Start the autoconfigure process to load your driver:

$ MCR SYSMAN IO AUTO/LOG/FULL

I suggest using lots of exe$kprintf() to track initialization process of your driver.


Paul A. Jacobi
VMS Software

[mark.foster]

I suspect that there is a wrong parameter on the IO CONNECT ...

Paul A. Jacobi
VMS Software

Thanks for all the useful information! I'll try your suggestions and reply with the results.

Mark Foster

[roberbrooks]

> VSI is planning on supporting VMDirectPath for Fiber Channel at some point.
> I am curious about the card and/or driver.

The "support" won't require any changes to VMS; we're in the process of testing it now; results look good!

The adapters that we're testing are the 16Gb/sec Qlogic QL2692 and a 32 Gb/sec adapter whose HPE part number is
SN1600Q.

We already support the QL2692 on IA64 systems.

[pocketprobe]

>The "support" won't require any changes to VMS; we're in the process of testing it now; results look good!
Glad to hear!
>The adapters that we're testing are the 16Gb/sec Qlogic QL2692 and a 32 Gb/sec adapter whose HPE part number is
SN1600Q.
Good to know
>We already support the QL2692 on IA64 systems.
And this.

I was asking about Mark's card, and pointing out that VMDirectPath should work well enough in VMS if VSI will support it.