When PCI-E Host Bus Adapter (HBA) cards with X1,X2, or X4 lane widths are installed in one or more of the PCI-E slots on Sun Fire T2000, intermittent failures to recognize the card(s) can occur (device does not appear present). These failures are due to a "PLX link training" issue and may lead to unnecessary hardware replacement.

Note: This issue can affect any PCI-Express HBA cards with lane widths of X1/X2/X4, but does not affect X8 PCI-E cards.

This issue can occur on the following platforms:

• Sun Fire T2000/T2000+ systems (with firmware prior to 6.1.13) without patch 122430-06
• Sun Fire T2000/T2000+ systems (with firmware prior to 6.3.2) without patch 124750-03

with any PCI-Express HBA card with lane widths X1/X2/X4 installed.

Note: X8 PCI-E HBA cards are not affected by this issue.

To determine the firmware revision on the system (and if it is affected), the following command can be run from the System Controller:

    sc> showhost
    Sun-Fire-T2000 System Firmware 6.3.0  2006/11/10 06:46
    Host flash versions:
    Hypervisor 1.3.0 2006/11/10 06:35
    OBP 4.25.0 2006/11/07 23:24
    POST 4.25.0 2006/11/08 00:08

In the example output above, the system is affected and requires the firmware upgrade.

Normally the PCI-E devices on T2000(+) are recognized by OpenBoot Firmware as:

    PCI-E slot 0:  /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/<device>@0
    PCI-E slot 1:  /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@8/<device>@0
    PCI-E slot 2: /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@9/<device>@0

During the "PLX link training" phase, some of the PCI-E devices may not be recognized at bootup. At OBP level the device will be missing from the OBP device tree (show-devs) and during subsequent Solaris boot, it wll be missing in the 'prtdiag -v' output as well. The system may also report a generic FMA message similar to the following:

    SUNOS-8000-1L

The only workaround at this time is to reboot the system (1-2 times) until all devices are recognized.

This issue is addressed in the following releases:

• Sun Fire T2000/T2000+ systems (with firmware prior to 6.1.13) with patch 122430-06 or later
• Sun Fire T2000/T2000+ systems (with firmware prior to 6.3.2) with patch 124750-03 or later

14-Feb-2007:

• Updated Contributing Factors and Resolution sections

• Updated Contributing Factors and Resolution sections
• State: Resolved

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