On Thu, 15 Aug 2024, Matthew W Carlis wrote:

quoted

Well, in principle in a setup with reliable links the LBMS bit may never 
be set, e.g. this system of mine has been in 24/7 operation since the last 
reboot 410 days ago and for the devices that support Link Active reporting 
it shows:
...
so out of 11 devices 6 have the LBMS bit clear.  But then 5 have it set, 
perhaps worryingly, so of course you're right, that it will get set in the 
field, though it's not enough by itself for your problem to trigger.

The way I look at it is that its essentially a probability distribution with time,
but I try to avoid learning too much about the physical layer because I would find
myself debugging more hardware issues lol. I also don't think LBMS/LABS being set
by itself is very interesting without knowing the rate at which it is being set.

 Agreed.  Ilpo's upcoming bandwidth controller will hopefully give us such 
data.

FWIW I have seen some devices in the past going into recovery state many times a
second & still never downtrain, but at the same time they were setting the
LBMS/LABS bits which maybe not quite spec compliant.

I would like to help test these changes, but I would like to avoid having to test
each mentioned change individually. Does anyone have any preferences in how I batch
the patches for testing? Would it be ok if I just pulled them all together on one go?

 Certainly fine with me, especially as 3/4 and 4/4 aren't really related 
to your failure scenario, and then you need 1/4 and 2/4 both at a time to 
address both aspects of the issue you have reported.

  Maciej