Comment 0 for bug 1983656

Virtual Machines with SR-IOV VFs from an Intel E810-XXV [8086:159b] get no traffic flow and produce error messages in both the host and guest during network configuration.

Environment: Ubuntu OpenStack Focal-Ussuri with OVN
Host Kernel: v5.15.0-41-generic 20.04 Focal-HWE
Guest Kernels: v5.4.x Focal, v5.15.0-41-generic Jammy

Host Error Messages:
ice 0000:98:00.1: VF 7 failed opcode 6, retval: -5

Guest Error Messages:
iavf 0000:00:05.0: PF returned error -5 (IAVF_ERR_PARAM) to our request 6

In the context of these errors "6" refers to the value of VIRTCHNL_OP_CONFIG_VSI_QUEUES

It was found in these cases that the VM is able to successfully transmit packets but never receives any and the RX packet drop counters for the VF in "ip link" on the host increase equal to the RX packet count.

There is a prior commit e6ba5273d4ede03d075d7a116b8edad1f6115f4d claiming to resolve this error in some cases. It is already included in the test kernel v5.15.0-41 and did not resolve the issue.

These Virtual Machines do work with the Mainline v5.19 build on the host and it includes the following two VIRTCHNL_OP_CONFIG_VSI_QUEUES related commits that are not currently backported to v5.15 or any upstream stable kernel:

6096dae926a22e2892ef9169f582589c16d39639 ice: clear stale Tx queue settings before configuring [v5.18]
be2af71496a54a7195ac62caba6fab49cfe5006c ice: Fix queue config fail handling [v5.19]

Additionally during testing if we link down an interface and/or try to use netplan apply to start DHCP instead of manual configuration we triggered the following memory corruption bug:
efe41860008e57fb6b69855b4b93fdf34bc42798 ice: Fix memory corruption in VF driver [v5.19]

It appears that this ice/iavf driver is quite immature as many significant SR-IOV related fixes have landed in each of the recent kernel releases and we may need to consider pro-actively backporting more fixes.