PSOD (purple screen of death) due to parity errors in the qfle3 driver

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

PSOD (purple screen of death) with the message: PF Exception 14 in world 2097436:HELPER_UPLIN IP 0x4200200888c4 addr 0xa

Backtrace:

qfle3_sp_helper_func@(qfle3)
ecore_state_wait_enhanced@(qfle3)
ecore_config_vlan_mac@(qfle3)
qfle3_set_mac_one@(qfle3)
qfle3_apply_queue_mac_filter@(qfle3)
qfle3_queue_apply_filter@(qfle3)
UplinkNetq_ApplyHwRxFilter@vmkernel
NetqueueBalActivatePendingFilters@vmkernel
NetqueueBalRxQueueCommitChanges@vmkernel
UplinkNetqueueBal_BalanceCB@vmkernel
UplinkAsyncProcessCallsHelperCB@vmkernel

Screenshot of the PSOD:

Logs Snippets in vmkernel.log:

yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ssZ cpu1:2098258)WARNING: qfle3: qfle3_parity_attn:16971: [vmnic4] Parity errors detected in blocks
yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ssZ cpu1:2098258)WARNING: qfle3: _print_next_block:16602: XSEMI
yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ssZ cpu1:2098258)WARNING: qfle3: _print_parity:16596:  [0x00000000]
yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ssZ cpu1:2098258)WARNING: qfle3: _print_parity:16596:  [0x00000020]
 

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0.x

Cause

Parity error is for VFC block.

Resolution

Marvell has a recovery mechanism implemented in the qfle3 driver to correct parity errors (when possible). If these parity errors are still being observed after driver/firmware upgrades it may be a result of hardware degradation. If these are isolated incidents, contact the hardware vendor to have the adapter replaced.