hp_apa driver Vs. btlan driver

[Enrico Venturi]

Hello colleagues,
I'm using HP Automatic Port Aggregation SW in my system; I've a proprietary OSI stack which is directly base on the LAN card driver; the proprietary stack properly works with the HP btlan drivers, but it fails with the hp_apa driver.
See the trace
11/02/105 15:28:11 *** init_dlpi - DL_ATTACH_REQ Lan Card on PPA 900
***
11/02/105 15:28:11 *** check_ctrl - expected_primitive = 0x06 incoming_primitive = 0xd22b8f3
***
11/02/105 15:28:11 *** handle_dlpi_primitive - FAILED DL_ATTACH_REQ
***
11/02/105 15:28:11 *** check_ctrl - expected_primitive = 0x06 incoming_primitive = 0x39b
***
11/02/105 15:28:11 *** ll_exit - DL_DETACH_REQ Lan Card
***
11/02/105 15:28:11 *** check_ctrl - expected_primitive = 0x06 incoming_primitive = 0x00
***

DO you have any ideas?
Is the hp_apa driver fully compatible with the btlan one?
The APA os configured in LAN monitor mode

thanks
Enrico

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Enrico,

Make sure you have *all* required prereq patches that APA needs.
Check the APA manual & the software.hp.com website for updates.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Enrico Venturi]

Unfortunately, all the required patches are already there :-((

[Enrico Venturi]

Moreover, when I try to reset the interface
through lanadmin, this is the error message I got:

Resetting LAN Interface to run selftest.
error: expected primitive 0x06, got DL_ERROR_ACK
dl_error_primitive = 0xe8
dl_errno = 0x04
dl_unix_errno = 223
Unable to reset LAN Interface.

[Steven E. Protter]

swverify \*

See if any of the patches you need for apa are not in a correct state.

apa is designed to work with the btlan driver which many HP NIC's use.

SEP

[Enrico Venturi]

Nothing of meaningful has been found by swverify :-(

[rick jones]

Can you be a bit more explicit about what you mean by "I've a proprietary OSI stack which is directly base on the LAN card driver?" Do you simply mean it sends DLPI primitives to the regular btlan driver, or do you mean it has other more explicit knowledge about btlan istelf?

In one or more of the DLPI include files (find /usr/include -name "*dlpi*" -print) you may find the values of those incoming_primitives which may give clues as to what APA did not like about what the OSI stack tried to do.

[Enrico Venturi]

I think that the problem key is the reset error issued by the driver.
My OSI stacks tries to connect to the APA driver, and it tries to reset the card at the first; the reset gives a negative result, therefore the OSI stack fails to start.

Therefore the real problem is:
why the reset fails?
this is the reset result when I run lanadmin - lan - reset

error: expected primitive 0x06, got DL_ERROR_ACK
dl_error_primitive = 0xe8
dl_errno = 0x04
dl_unix_errno = 223
Unable to reset LAN Interface.

[rick jones]

If I had to guess, I'd say that trying to "reset" an aggretate is not supported. Reset is likely considered a HW thing. There might be something discussed about that in the APA docs (guessing).

BTW, why on earth is the OSI stack issuing a reset in the first place?!?

[Enrico Venturi]

I guess "my" stack tries to reset the card as first operation because this runs a selftest... so actually the stack checks if the card properly runs launching a self-testing through a reset.

regards
Enrico

[Xianjie Zhang · Accepted solution]

As one of those who maintains APA, I am sorry to tell you that APA driver is NOT the same as btlan drivers.
Some operations supported by btlan driver are not supported by APA. "Reset" card is one of those not supported by APA. Another un-supported one is "changing MAC address".
APA supports "most" DLPI primitives.

[Enrico Venturi]

The hp_apa doesn't support the reset.