[PVE-User] pve-kernel-4.13.13-5-pve hang with high IO

[Olivier Benghozi]

Meltdown mitigation is software / kernel only, so doesn't depend on microcode in any way.

Spectre mitigation could be be mainly software based (but retpoline isn't available yet) or microcode + software based, but such microcode doesn't exist in a usable state yet as Intel recognised that it triggered crashes on Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake/Kabylake processors, so the BIOS with such updated microcodes were withdrawn by vendors until Intel releases something new...
So, you don't have to bother about the microcode today.

This has nothing to do with Eneko's issue, however :)

> Le 24 janv. 2018 à 09:46, Uwe Sauter <uwe.sauter.de at gmail.com> a écrit :
> 
> As long as you microcode is older than June 2017 there is no way that there are mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre as Intel was
> only made aware of the flaws back in June 2017.
> 
> Same goes for the BIOS as the vendors require the microcode from Intel to include into their updates.
> 
> Regarding the state of the kernel I cannot make any statement.
> 
> 
> Am 24.01.2018 um 09:35 schrieb Eneko Lacunza:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> We just installed Proxmox 5.1 on a i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz machine with 32GB of RAM two days ago. It has 4 disks with mdraid6.
>> 
>> It has been working very well for two days; more than 1TB of VM disk have been transferred to that Proxmox, and they have been
>> moved from a Directory based storage to a LVM-thin storage successfully.
>> 
>> Last night at 23:32 it hanged, and we had to hard-reboot it this morning. On that moment it was receiving  about 100MB/s of
>> network traffic to a VM backed on LVM-thin disk, and writing the data to disk (several rsync transfers). Don't know if that
>> activity is related to the hang really, syslog just shows about 20 lines of garbage.
>> 
>> Anyone has seen something like this lately? I first thought about Meltdown/Spectre patches and reboot issues, but don't know
>> what's the state in current Proxmox kernels.
>> 
>> I can see the following in kernel boot log, doesn't seem it is loading a very recent microcode:
>> Jan 24 09:18:30 orion kernel: [    0.000000] microcode: microcode updated early to revision 0x1c, date = 2015-02-26
>> 
>> Also BIOS seems old, shouldn't be patched:
>> Jan 24 09:18:30 orion kernel: [    0.000000] DMI: System manufacturer System Product Name/P8H77-M PRO, BIOS 9002 05/30/2014
>> 
>> # pveversion -v
>> proxmox-ve: 5.1-36 (running kernel: 4.13.13-5-pve)