Power7 Mid-Range Systems Firmware

New Features and Functions

• PARTITION-DEFERRED: Support for Live Partition Mobility (LPM) between systems running Ax720 system firmware, and 8246-L2S systems.
  

System firmware changes that affect all systems

• The firmware was enhanced to increase the threshold of soft NVRAM errors on the service processor to 32 before SRC B15xF109 is logged.  (Replacement of the service processor is recommended if more than one B15xF109 is logged per week.)
• The firmware was enhanced to call out the correct field replaceable units (FRUs) when SRC B124E504 with description "Chnl init TO due to SN stuck in recovery" was logged.
• A problem was fixed that caused informational SRC A70047FF, which may indicate that the Anchor (VPD) card should be replaced, to be erroneously logged again after the Anchor card was replaced.
• A problem was fixed that caused booting from a virtual fibre channel tape device to fail with SRC B2008105.
• A problem was fixed that caused a dynamic LPAR (DLPAR) add operation to fail on an empty PCI slot that is not hot-pluggable.
  
• The firmware resolves undetected N-mode stability problems and improves error reporting on the feature code (F/C) 5802 and 5877 I/O drawer power subsystem.
• A problem was fixed that caused a system to crash when the system was in low power (or safe) mode, and the system attempted to switch over to nominal mode.

• The firmware was enhanced to fix a potential performance degradation on systems utilizing the stride-N stream prefetch instructions dcbt (with TH=1011) or dcbtst (with TH=1011).  Typical applications executing these algorithms include High Performance Computing, data intensive applications exploiting streaming instruction prefetchs, and applications utilizing the Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library (ESSL) 5.1.
• A problem was fixed that caused the hypervisor to hang during a concurrent operation on a F/C 5802, 5803, 5873 or 5877 I/O drawer.  Recovering from the hypervisor hang required a platform reboot.
  
• On systems with the F/C 1804 (Integrated 4 Port (2x1Gb and 2x10Gb SFP+ Optical-SR ports)) or F/C 1813 (Integrated, 4 Port (2x1Gb and 2x10Gb SFP+ Copper twinax ports)), the firmware was enhanced to prevent the attached network switch from prematurely shutting down the Ethernet port due to link flaps detected during IPL.
  
• A problem was fixed that impacted performance if profiling was enabled in one or more partitions.  Performance profiling is enabled:
      - In an AIX or VIOS partition using the tprof (-a, -b, -B, -E option) command or pmctl (-a, -E option) command.
      - In an IBM i partition when the PEX *TRACE profile (TPROF) collections or PEX *PROFILE collections are active.
      - In a Linux partition using the perf command, which is available in RHEL6 and SLES11; profiling with oprofile does not cause the problem.

• A problem was fixed that caused multiple types of failures (CHARM node  operations and Advanced Energy Manager (AEM) state changes, among others), after a CHARM hot node operation on the first (top) drawer (or the first logical node) was followed by a concurrent firmware installation.
  
• A problem was fixed that caused unrecoverable SRCs B1813918 and B182953C during a CHARM operation.
• A problem was fixed that caused SRC BA180020 to be erroneously logged when the partitions on a system were restarted after a CHARM operation.
  

System firmware changes that affect all systems

• HIPER/Not pervasive:  A problem was fixed that caused the system to crash with SRC B18187DA.
• The firmware was enhanced to log SRC B1768B76 as informational instead of unrecoverable.
• The firmware was enhanced to increase the threshold for recoverable SRC B113E504 so that the processor core reporting the SRC is not guarded out.  This prevents performance loss and the unnecessary replacement of processor modules.
• A problem was fixed prevented a platform system dump from being deleted when the file system space on the service processor was full.
• The firmware was enhanced to log SRC B1812A11 as informational, instead of "service action required", when the thermal/power management device (TPMD) is successfully reset.
• The field replaceable unit (FRU) callouts were enhanced for SRC B181E550.
• A problem was fixed that caused the message "500 - Internal Server Error." to be displayed when a setting was changed on the Advanced System Management Interface's (ASMI's) power on/off menu, when the change was attempted when the system was powering down.
• A problem was fixed that erroneously caused SRC B1818601 to be logged and an FSP dump to be generated.
• The firmware was enhanced to log an error, instead of causing a kernel panic, if a guard record was corrupted or truncated.
• A problem was fixed that caused the wrong error code to be logged when the memory test took longer than normal during system boot.
• A problem was fixed that caused a system's partition dates to revert back to 1969 after the service processor or its battery was replaced.  This occurred regardless of whether or not the service processor's time-of-day (TOD) clock was correctly set during the service action. 
  
• A problem was fixed that caused the system to appear to hang, and a service processor reset/reload to occur, when multiple hardware errors occurred.
• A problem was fixed that caused SRC B7005442 to be erroneously logged, and functional processor cores to be guarded out, when an error occurred in the operation system or an application.
• A problem was fixed that erroneously caused SRC B1818601 to be logged and an FSP dump to be generated. 
  
• A problem was fixed that caused multiple service processor dumps to be unnecessarily taken during a concurrent firmware update.  SRC B181EF9A, which indicates that the dump space on the service processor is full, was logged as a result.
• The firmware was enhanced by the addition of a new option in the system management services (SMS) "Multi-boot" menu that facilitates zoning of physical and virtual fibre channel adapters.
• A problem was fixed that caused a partition migration operation to abort when the partition has more than 4096 virtual slots.
• A problem was fixed that caused SRC B18138B7 to be erroneously logged, and the service processor to terminate, when errors were continuously logged due to failing hardware.
• A problem was fixed that caused a firmware installation from the HMC with the "do not auto accept" option selected to fail.
• A problem was fixed that caused the system to fail to boot with SRC B1xxB507.
• A problem was fixed the caused system fans to be erroneously called out as failing.
  

• HIPER/Pervasive on systems with a Virtual Input/Output (VIO) client running AIX, and with a F/C 5802 or 5877 I/O drawer attached:  A problem was fixed that caused the system to crash with SRC B700F103.
• On systems running more than 100 logical partitions, a problem was fixed that caused a concurrent firmware installation to fail.
• On systems running the Advanced Energy Manager (AEM), that terminates when in dynamic power save mode, a problem was fixed that caused SRCs B150B943, B113C660, and B113C661 to be erroneously logged when the system rebooted.
• On systems running Active Memory Sharing (AMS), the firmware was enhanced to reduce the time required to migrate an AMS partition.
• On systems running Active Memory Sharing (AMS), a problem was fixed that caused the system to crash during the creation of a logical partition (LPAR).
• On systems running Active Memory Sharing (AMS), a problem was fixed that prevented an AMS partition from being activated with SRC B2006009.
• On systems running VIOS, a problem was fixed that caused the location code in the output of the VIOS command "lsmap -npiv -all" to be incorrect.
• A problem was fixed that caused a shared processor partition that is configured with two virtual processors and an entitled capacity of 1.0 processors to hang when only one processor is in the physical shared pool.
• On systems running iSCSI, a problem was fixed that caused the system to hang when booting from an iSCSI device in the system management services (SMS) menus.
• On the System Management Services (SMS) remote IPL (RIPL) menus, a problem was fixed that caused the SMS menu to continue to show that an Ethernet device is configured for iSCSI, even though the user has changed it to BOOTP.
• On systems running the Advanced Energy Manager (AEM), a problem was fixed that caused the work rate calculation for a processor to be incorrect if the system dropped into safe mode.
• On systems from which a node has been removed, a problem was fixed that caused the node to continue to be listed when the Processing Unit Deconfiguration option was selected on the Advanced System Management Interface (ASMI) menus.
• On systems in which a service processor had been guarded out manually, a problem was fixed that caused the Deconfiguration Records option, which is under the System Service Aids in the Advanced System Management Interface (ASMI), to display null data for that service processor.
• A problem was fixed that prevented the operating system from being notified that a F/C 5802 or 5877 I/O drawer had recovered from an input power fault (SRC 10001512 or 10001522).
  
• On a multi-drawer system, a problem was fixed that prevented the system attention LED from correctly reflecting the status of the DASD fault LEDs in drawers 2, 3, and 4.
• On systems using Capacity on Demand (CoD), a problem was fixed that caused informational SRC B7005300 to be logged so often that the error logs wrapped, and other information in the error logs was lost.
• On systems are upgraded from Ax710 system firmware to Ax720 system firmware, a problem was fixed that caused the utility processor capacity-on-demand (CoD) parameters to erroneously change when the Ax720 system firmware was installed.
  

• On a system with mirrored memory, a problem was fixed that caused a hot node repair operation to fail.
• A problem was fixed that caused the host Ethernet adapters (HEA) to be in a non-functional state after a hot node add.
• A problem was fixed that caused the hypervisor's memory usage to grow during a CHARM node evacuation operation.  When this problem occurred, the amount of reserved memory (the memory the hypervisor is using) increases, and the amount of available memory decreases, as viewed on the Hardware Management Console (HMC).