H3's Deep Knowledge in PCIe Switch and Composable Instrastructure

One of our North American clients encountered trouble loading the devices on Falcon 4109. Our PCIe switch expert, having years of experience and domain knowledge, successfully solved our customer’s problems. The customer gave a big thanks to H3 for the comprehensive service.

In Dec 2022, H3 got an email about the issue the customer encountered. The summary of the email is below. 
 

We encountered functional issues while validating the Falcon H3_4109 chassis. After loading the kernel module of the Oregano NIC, also with the other seven devices installed, the host got frozen. The keyboard, mouse, and network does not respond. The system has to be reset to get out of this. However, such a problem does not occur while the Oregano NIC is loaded on the host or singly on the chassis. Please help us with this issue in your chassis.

 

The customer insisted that the problem is on the Gen 4 Falcon chassis since there was no similar problem in their previous generations. However, the technical expert found that the problem happens due to the IRQ conflict. He saw that one device did not release the IRQ, leading to the stuck.

Knowing it could be blamed cause, the expert asked the customer to run the eight devices using the same arrangement on their previous chassis to see if the same issue appeared. The trouble did occur to their Gen 3 and Gen 2 chassis with the same setup. It can say that the situation resulted from the hardware design instead of the PCIe chassis.

As the customer found the issue also happened to their previous boxes, they got stunned. They know they need to rearrange the cards to avoid the IRQ conflict problem, which they have not been aware of before. They expressed gratitude to our PCIe professionals, impressed with the deep knowledge of PCIe switches and composable solutions owned by H3. 
The email they replied to H3 is summarized below.

Thank you very much for your support and demystification of the big problem for us. Having used our old PCIe expansion chassis for ten years, we have never encountered this problem. The reproduction of the trouble on the Gen 3 and Gen 2 chassis surprised us. 

We inferred we got this problem since 
1. We replaced the old chassis with the new Falcon chassis.
2. We produced our 64-bit OS to replace our old 32-bit OS.
 
Perhaps, it is the combination of the two changes that brought up the problem.

In any case, we will note this IRQ conflict issue between the different third-party cards in our documentation […] Thanks again for your support. It is appreciated.

Best regards, 

Such a reply is encouraging. It is years of effort in the PCIe composable infrastructure domain that H3 can proudly say we are the expert in this field. We are competent in providing satisfying solutions and support to our clients.