Power6 Mid-Range Firmware

06/30/10

System firmware changes that affect all systems

• A problem was fixed that caused a call home to be erroneously made with SRC B181E911, and a service processor dump to be taken unnecessarily.
  
• A problem was fixed that caused the HMC to show a status of "Incomplete" for the managed system, and numerous service processor dumps to be generated.

• On systems running the IBM i operating system, a problem was fixed that caused a DLPAR move operation with an IOP (I/O processor) and IOA (I/O adapter) to fail intermittently.  The DLPAR operation was successful, but the IOA failed to power on in the new partition.

• A problem was fixed that would cause a concurrent maintenance operation to fail if the HMC was rebooted before the previous CM operation was complete.
  

05/10/10

System firmware changes that affect all systems

• DEFERRED, HIPER: A problem was fixed that caused SRC B113E504 with word 8 of the SRC = 074B001F or, 0197001F on 8234-EMA systems with processor F/C 7537, and 9406-MMA and 9117-MMA systems with processor F/Cs 7387, 7388 and 7540.
  
• The firmware was enhanced to dynamically update the IPL speed on the control (operator) panel when the IPL speed is changed by another method.
• On systems running EM350_xxx firmware, a problem was fixed the prevented the reset/reload bit from being set correctly in a service processor error log entry.

• On systems with F/C 5802 or F/C 5877 I/O drawers attached, the firmware was enhanced to prevent SRCs 10001510, 10001512, 10001520, and 10001521 from being erroneously logged when A/C power was removed and reapplied when the drawer is powered off.
  
• On systems with redundant service processors, a problem was fixed that caused SRC B181E617 to be erroneously logged and a service processor dump to be unnecessarily generated.
  

Concurrent maintenance (CM) firmware fixes


• On systems with F/C 5802 or F/C 5877 I/O drawers attached and a boot device in the drawer, a problem was fixed that prevented a partition from booting after the concurrent repair of the GX adapter that connects the 5802 or 5877 drawer to the system, or to the node that contains the GX adapter.
  

03/15/10

System firmware changes that affect all systems

• HIPER: A problem was fixed that caused the system to crash with SRCs B700F103 and B181F0E7, if the server was running AIX and had a  F/C 5802 or 5877 drawer (in a 19" rack), or F/C 5803 or 5873 drawer (in a 24" rack), attached.
• DEFERRED:   This fix corrects the handling of a specific processor instruction sequence that has the potential to result in undetected data errors.  This specific instruction sequence has only been observed in a small number of highly tuned Floating Point intensive applications.  However, it is strongly recommended that this fix be applied to all POWER6 systems.  This fix has the potential to decrease system performance on applications that make extensive use of floating point divide, square root, or estimate instructions.
  
• A problem was fixed that prevented an SRC from being recorded in the service processor dump produced by a host-initiated reset.
• A problem was fixed that caused SRC 10009135, followed by 10009139, to be erroneously logged.  These SRCs indicate a system power control network (SPCN) loop is being broken, then re-established.
• A problem was fixed that, under certain rare circumstances, caused a partition to hang when being shut down.
• A problem was fixed that caused the system to hang with SRCs B182953C, B182954C and B17BE434 being logged.
• The firmware was enhanced to detect and handle 12X InfiniBand I/O drawer cabling errors better.
• A problem was fixed that, under certain rare circumstances, caused the system to become unresponsive and appear to hang  when page migration occurred on a PCIe slot.

• A problem was fixed that caused a virtual SCSI or virtual fibre channel adapter to be seen by the operating system as not bootable when it was added to a partition using a dynamic LPAR (DLPAR) operation.
• On systems running IBM i, a problem was fixed that caused booting the operating system from a fibre channel device to fail with SRC 576B8301.
• On systems with a F/C 5802 or 5877 drawer attached, a problem was fixed that could impact the performance of a 4-port Ethernet adapter F/C 5272, 5275, 5279, 5280, 5525, 5526, or 5527 installed in that drawer.
• In partitions running AIX or Linux, a problem was fixed that caused the addition of an I/O slot to a partition using a dynamic LPAR (DLPAR) add operation to fail.
• On systems with shared processors, a problem was fixed that caused the partitions to hang and become unresponsive for very short periods of time.
• A problem was fixed that prevented the IPv6 DHCP address from being displayed on the advanced system management interface (ASMI) network configuration screens when IPv6 and DHCP were enabled.  This only occurred on systems with virtual LAN (VLAN) addresses (such as eth0.30, eth0.31), and when IPv6 addresses were assigned to the eth0.xx interface.
• On systems running redundant VIOS partitions, a problem was fixed that prevented Ethernet traffic from being properly bridged between the two partitions.  This problem also prevented shared Ethernet adapter failover from working correctly.

Concurrent maintenance (CM) firmware fixes 
• A problem was fixed that prevented the concurrent repair of a redundant service processor.
• A problem was fixed that caused unpredictable system behavior if a capacity on demand (CoD) or a virtualization engine technology (VET) activation code was entered and accepted after a node 0 evacuation was done.  The unpredictable machine behavior might also have occurred, if a node 0 evacuation failed, a system dump was taken, and a memory-preserving IPL was then initiated.
• A problem was fixed that caused a concurrent maintenance operation after a node evacuation to fail.  When this problem occurred, the system erroneously states that a platform memory dump is pending.
• A problem was fixed that prevented a concurrent maintenance operation from completing successfully.

10/30/09

New Features and Functions:

• Support for the concurrent removal of 12X-attached 19" I/O drawers.
• Support for F/C 5877, the diskless version of 19" I/O drawer F/C 5802.
• Support for a USB-attached half-high 5.25" backup device using a removable hard disk drive (HDD).
• Support for a platform dump that is not disruptive.
• Support for i5/OS multipath storage I/O through VIOS partitions.

• A problem was fixed that might cause a concurrent firmware maintenance (CFM) operation to fail repeatedly, or a concurrent maintenance (CM) operation to fail repeatedly, when a large number of I/O loop errors were being logged during the CFM operation.
• The firmware was enhanced to handle system dumps (SYSDUMPs) larger than 4GB in size.
• On systems running system firmware release EM340, a problem was fixed that caused a dynamic LPAR (DLPAR) operation on memory to fail until the platform was rebooted.
• The firmware was enhanced to improve the performance of the F/C 5732, 5735 and 5769 PCI-E adapters.
• A problem was fixed that caused a repair and verify (R&V) operation on the HMC to fail with the message "Exception encountered while rendering panel as HTML".
• The firmware was enhanced such that SRCs B181F126, B181F127, and B181F129 are correctly logged, and no longer calls home unnecessarily for these SRCs.
• The firmware was enhanced to more accurately describe the reason memory was deconfigured on the advanced system management interface (ASMI) memory deconfiguration screen.

• A problem was fixed that caused SRC B181A494 to be erroneously logged if a concurrent maintenance operation took longer than 60 minutes.
• On systems with four drawers, a problem was fixed that caused the service processor to perform a reset/reload, which caused a concurrent maintenance operation to fail, on the fourth drawer.