qlnativefc driver cause intermediate LUN disconnection

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• The qlnativefc driver misinterprets ATS miscompare commands as dropped frames.
• The intermediate connection loss to the storage LUNs drops.
• In the ESX - /var/log/vmkernel.log file, the following entries will be present, similar to:
  
  2015-07-13T11:15:04.835Z cpu30:33574)qlnativefc: vmhba2(84:0.1): 18 commands with Dropped Frame detected within 5 sec.
2015-07-13T11:15:04.852Z cpu28:32940)qlnativefc: vmhba2(84:0.1): scsi(0:1) Dropped frame(s) detected (512 of 1024 bytes) residual length mismatch.
2015-07-13T11:15:04.852Z cpu28:32940)qlnativefc: vmhba2(84:0.1): C0:T0:L1 - FCP command status: 0x15-0xb02 (0x2) portid=111e00 oxid=0x7f cdb=890000 len=1024 rsp_info=0x8 resid=0x400 fw_resid=0x200 host status = 0x2 device status = 0x0

Environment

VMware ESX 

Cause

This issue occurs when the qlnativefc driver reports the ATS miscompare incorrectly to the upper layers. This is due to the mismatch between the residual length of 1024 bytes returned by the target versus the qlnativefc driver’s expected residual length of 512 bytes.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, upgrade the qlnativefc driver.

 

For ESXi 5.5

 

To resolve this issue, use the qlnativefc driver Version 1.1.58 or later

 

For ESXi 6.0

 

To resolve this issue, use the qlnativefc driver Version 2.1.30.0-1 or later

For ESXi 6.5 and above

The earliest driver provided for this version is 2.1.102.0 which is above the fixed versions listed above. If similar vmkernel messaging is found, update to the latest qlnativefc driver and see if this resolves the issue. If it does not, please engage Broadcom technical support for further investigation. 

The latest drivers can be found here for each version:

ESXi 8.0 drivers

ESX 7.0 drivers

Additional Information