White Paper

5
PCI ER decreases the frequency of crashes, service calls, & repair rates for PCI errors by a factor of 20 to
25 times. Without PCI error recovery, the entry-level system I/O errors account for more than 20% of all
errors in the system.
Tables below list the time taken by the PCI/PCIe cards to recover from PCI errors with the error recovery
feature.
Table 1: PCI / PCIe Card Recovery with PCI Error Recovery Feature on Legacy Platform
Event Time Taken
PCI / PCIx slot card
recovery
In the range:
10 secs – 2.5 mins
PCIe card recovery ~ 6 secs
Table 2: PCIe Card Recovery with PCI Error Recovery Feature on HP Superdome 2
Platform
Event Time Taken
PCIe card recovery ~ 5 secs
Refer to concurrent dump whitepaper (link provided below) for details on time taken for the system to
recover from MCA due to PCI I/O errors, without error recovery functionality.
http://www.hp.com/go/hpux-core-docs under HP-UX 11i v3 category.
Types of Error Recovery
The PCI/PCIe cards can be recovered from the errors either manually or automatically.
Manual recovery, also known as Error Handling, is supported on HP-UX 11i v2 OS on legacy
platforms only. In this type of error recovery, the PCI / PCIe cards are isolated due to errors and must be
manually recovered. Users can use olrad (1 M) command or Attention Button to recover the cards
manually.
Automatic recovery, also known as Error Recovery, is supported on HP-UX 11i v3 OS. In this type of error
recovery, the PCI / PCIe cards that are isolated because of errors are automatically recovered by the
core PSM (Platform Support Module).
Table 3 provides the error recovery OS support details.
Table 3: Error Recovery OS Support Details
Types of
Error
Recovery
OS Support
Manual error
recovery
On HP
-
UX 11i v1 and HP
-
UX 11i v2
OS legacy platforms
,
users
are required to manually recover* cards from PCI errors.
Non hot-pluggable slots are not supported on HP-UX 11i v1
and HP-UX 11i v2 systems.