Intel Atom C2xxx LPC failures

[dennypage]

@MordyT:

So when purchasing, they did the math and said "Chance of it breaking vs cost of HA - we will risk it". Now that the chance is significantly higher due to this specific Intel issue…

When purchasing, they didn't "do the math," they "made a guess." Doing the math would have required MTBF projections to work with. To my knowledge, ADI has not published any MTBF projections. And anyone that would actually go to the point of analyzing MTBF and cost to the business of failure would not be asking "should we have a spare," they would be asking "how many spares should we have?"

Netgate, while saying that they believe that most customers will not encounter the issue at all, have extended their one year warranty to three years to cover this issue. That's a pretty strong commitment for a small business to make. They certainly didn't have to do that. In my view, this is more than satisfactory.

Perhaps another way to look at this might offer you some comfort: Netgate extended their warranty to three years, effectively tripling their liability. They must have very good reason to believe that the number of units that will actually fail in three years of operation will be quite low. Otherwise, the commitment would constitute corporate suicide. I'm pretty sure that was not their intent.

[MordyT]

@dennypage:

@MordyT:

So when purchasing, they did the math and said "Chance of it breaking vs cost of HA - we will risk it". Now that the chance is significantly higher due to this specific Intel issue…

When purchasing, they didn't "do the math," they "made a guess." Doing the math would have required MTBF projections to work with. To my knowledge, ADI has not published any MTBF projections. And anyone that would actually go to the point of analyzing MTBF and cost to the business of failure would not be asking "should we have a spare," they would be asking "how many spares should we have?"

Netgate, while saying that they believe that most customers will not encounter the issue at all, have extended their one year warranty to three years to cover this issue. That's a pretty strong commitment for a small business to make. They certainly didn't have to do that. In my view, this is more than satisfactory.

Perhaps another way to look at this might offer you some comfort: Netgate extended their warranty to three years, effectively tripling their liability. They must have very good reason to believe that the number of units that will actually fail in three years of operation will be quite low. Otherwise, the commitment would constitute corporate suicide. I'm pretty sure that was not their intent.

"They did the math" is an expression. Although, that doesn't matter here.

Lets say I told you the client had 1000 locations. And had a SG-2440 or better at each. That's a half million spent at SG-2440 prices for HA.
And lets say we had HA (after spending half a million for that) - we would use the same firewall most likely for the HA unit…
Which means we would have 2000 devices all affected by the same bug.
And chance are we put them both in and turned them on same day. Which means that they would probably fail at the same time (or very close to it).

They did a cost vs risk analysis. The information they used in that is now wrong - the likelihood of failure is higher now. We can debate what information they used and should they have used that information all day, but it really is irrelevant. We can debate should they have HA or spares on a shelf, but that is also irrelevant to the discussion. In fact, the only things relevant to this discussion is

1. whats going to happen to the equipment in the field with regards to potential LPC failures
2. what's netgate going to do
3. and the reason for 2.

Right now we are told the equipment will work fine, netgate will extend the warranty to 3 years, and that is because the equipment will be fine.

Some of us don't believe that to be true (the equipment will be fine). As such, I have proposed another 2 options, namely a 5 year or better warranty for hardware that does have a clock signal failure (since it shouldn't happen according to netgate, this should be a no brainer), or a proactive replacement.

I'd be interested to hear your reasoning as to why you or anyone else (really I want to hear from Netgate) are opposed to this. I'm not really interested in further discussing "should someone have HA or spares on the shelf" in this topic - that's a valid topic for another thread and has nothing to do with this thread. This thread, as the title says, is about the Intel Atom C2xxx LPC failures.

[jwt]

@dennypage:

@MordyT:

So when purchasing, they did the math and said "Chance of it breaking vs cost of HA - we will risk it". Now that the chance is significantly higher due to this specific Intel issue…

Netgate, while saying that they believe that most customers will not encounter the issue at all, have extended their one year warranty to three years to cover this issue. That's a pretty strong commitment for a small business to make. They certainly didn't have to do that. In my view, this is more than satisfactory.

Perhaps another way to look at this might offer you some comfort: Netgate extended their warranty to three years, effectively tripling their liability. They must have very good reason to believe that the number of units that will actually fail in three years of operation will be quite low. Otherwise, the commitment would constitute corporate suicide. I'm pretty sure that was not their intent.

Correct, Denny.  (And thanks!)

Exactly your last sentence above.  We are a small company.  We know how many systems we've sold, and we know the modeled failure rate and timeline to failure of the affected component.

No, I'm not going to let on with any numbers.  Some of it is proprietary to Netgate, some of it is covered by NDA.

[jwt]

@MordyT:

@dennypage:

@MordyT:

So when purchasing, they did the math and said "Chance of it breaking vs cost of HA - we will risk it". Now that the chance is significantly higher due to this specific Intel issue…

And chance are we put them both in and turned them on same day. Which means that they would probably fail at the same time (or very close to it).

You're wrong here, and I'm bound to not explain why or how.

[jwt]

@gcu_greyarea:

I wonder if Netgate/pfSense understand that "word of mouth" is a major contribution to their sales and marketing efforts.

Somebody else has already mentioned it - that those Edge Routers look better by the minute.
They may not do everything pfsense can do, but hey - they're cheap.

• I believe we do, yes.

• And that's all you can really say about them.

[garyd9]

…and the thread goes on and on and on...  And no one from pfSense/Netgate is commenting on if new units will have the issue resolved before shipping or not.

There's plenty of HA debate, accusations of wanting free hardware, and so on...

Look... extending the warranty to 3 years is a good deal.  It's better than some of the other things I've seen out there concerning this issue, and most definitely better than those who experienced the failure BEFORE intel acknowledged the issue got.

Yet, there's still this nagging question about if new units being shipped are having the work-around performed before shipment or not...

Maybe netgate doesn't want to go through the expense of fixing existing stock, and they are planning the next revision of hardware instead?  C3xxx based?

I don't know.  In truth, the answers don't impact me whatsoever.  I'm just curious.

[MordyT]

@jwt:

@MordyT:

@MordyT:

So when purchasing, they did the math and said "Chance of it breaking vs cost of HA - we will risk it". Now that the chance is significantly higher due to this specific Intel issue…

And chance are we put them both in and turned them on same day. Which means that they would probably fail at the same time (or very close to it).

You're wrong here, and I'm bound to not explain why or how.

Fair enough.
If you can respond to this at least….
I'm wrong on which part - the chance of it failing being significantly higher or the chance of 2 systems put into service same day will fail near each other?

I understand that you may be restricted from revealing information - don't hold it against you or netgate. Part of the general frustration some of us have is that no one will reveal any information. In the past, when information like this is withheld, it usually turns out it as bad if not worse then people are guessing. And all that does is further feed the general negative feelings.

[VAMike]

@MordyT:

They did a cost vs risk analysis. The information they used in that is now wrong - the likelihood of failure is higher now.

You're just making stuff up. (Or, if there was a risk analysis, someone made up numbers to go into it.) There is no baseline failure rate, and the delta is unknown. So the math is something like "unknown * unknown = even more unknown". You're not basing this on any kind of real analysis, you're reacting to a scare story.

Some of us don't believe that to be true (the equipment will be fine). As such, I have proposed another 2 options, namely a 5 year or better warranty for hardware that does have a clock signal failure (since it shouldn't happen according to netgate, this should be a no brainer), or a proactive replacement.

I'd be interested to hear your reasoning as to why you or anyone else (really I want to hear from Netgate) are opposed to this.

Because then the company is saddled with an ongoing responsibility to deal with incoming claims, whether valid or not. E.g., if someone static zaps their board 4 years from now, netgate is going to have to deal with the claim that the c2xxx bug was the problem. They're going to have to either maintain spares and just hand them to anyone who asks for one, or keep people around who remember how to deal with a long-obsolete board, or they'll have to just give people free new computers whenever they ask for one. For something that's unlikely (with an unknown magnitude) that's excessive for a small company to commit to.

Repeat after me: cisco is only giving out free computers to people who are paying something around the parts value of a netgate firewall every year for maintenance. If I offered to replace your netgear routers proactively if you would agree to enter a 5 year $150/yr service contract, which would also cover future failures, would you take me up on that deal? Heck, if enough people say yes I'd actually consider it–there's a decent profit to be made.

[gcu_greyarea]

Let's assume for a moment that I have redundant power, UPS'es, hot spares,  cold spares, followed all the best practices and have mature process in place….

All of the above considered - Netgate still sold me a unit with a component that is likely to fail prematurely.

Even worse, Netgate is continuing to sell these units.

It is not of Netgate's concern what I do with my SG series appliance - and how I use it. As far as Netgate is concerned I could use it as a coaster to put my beer on.

What IS of Netgate's concern is that they have an unhappy customer who'se beer coaster has a faulty CPU. And I want it fixed.

The advertisement says "This system is designed for a long deployment lifetime." This is misleading because a key component of the system has - according to its manufacturer (intel) - a higher than projected failure rate, starting at around 18 months of use.

Therefore the SG series products are not fit for purpose and the "lemon law" should apply.

[chpalmer]

@gcu_greyarea:

Netgate is continuing to sell these units.

Says you.  Ive seen no evidence of that either way.  Remember NDA's cover allot of ground.

Until I hear from them either way Im going to hold any judgement. AFAIC Im not so sure that I won't get 100 years out of them until I see differently. So what if Im wrong. Ill deal with that road when I get to it. Im going to continue to put equipment out knowing what I know now and choose what I put out based on the knowledge I have. If that means I put something else out from someone else that is my decision. That product might have an unknown bug which does show up and ruin my day in the summer of 2019 in which the Netgate product would have still worked flawlessly.  I don't have a crystal ball and I don't pretend I could read it if I did.  I wish others would follow suit but I digress.

No one is forcing you to buy or distribute something you don't trust. But just because you don't trust it doesn't mean anyone else shouldn't.

Personally I blame no one but Intel on this one.  Im of the belief that this could be an attempt to limit the life of a product in order to increase future profits, and that they screwed up the math . But that's just me.

I will hold companies like Arris and Linksys (among others) accountable for the PUMA6 debacle  because that screwup was apparent from the get go, and testing should have shown it.  Netgate and others could have never know this "fault" (thread subject) was possible from their provided documentation from Intel and Im willing to take a little responsibility with that. My customers appreciate that and will not fault me for not understanding the Crystal Ball instructions.  8)

:)

[doktornotor]

@gcu_greyarea:

unhappy customer who'se beer coaster has a faulty CPU. And I want it fixed.

GOTO. Now, you'd better use one of these for any of your firewalls.

[VAMike]

@gcu_greyarea:

All of the above considered - Netgate still sold me a unit with a component that is likely to fail prematurely.

You have no real basis for your hysteria. Please cite a credible source for "likely to fail prematurely".

[luckman212]

I noticed ADI has a new 01.00.00.12 BIOS out for the RCC-VE platform.  I haven't tested it, and am not recommending you run out & flash it. Just posting this for informational purposes.  The release notes can be found in this pdf on Github.  But here's a nugget from the last page:

RELEASE ADI_RCCVE-01.00.00.12
Release Date: 03/01/2017

The versions of software components used in this release are:
• SageBIOS: SageBios_Mohon_Peak_292.
• FSP: RANGELEY_FSP_POSTGOLD3.
• microcode: M01406D8125 for B0 stepping.
• Descriptor: ADI unlocked

New Features
• Workaround for Intel C2000 Errata AVR.58
A software workaround for Intel C2000 Errata AVR.50 has been implemented in this release. The
workaround disables SERIRQ to prevent indeterminate interrupt behavior for systems that do not have
external pull up resistor on SERIRQ PIN.

[MordyT]

@VAMike:

@MordyT:

They did a cost vs risk analysis. The information they used in that is now wrong - the likelihood of failure is higher now.

You're just making stuff up. (Or, if there was a risk analysis, someone made up numbers to go into it.) There is no baseline failure rate, and the delta is unknown. So the math is something like "unknown * unknown = even more unknown". You're not basing this on any kind of real analysis, you're reacting to a scare story.

This is veering off topic - you can speculate all you want on how we did our analysis, I won't get into that.

@VAMike:

@MordyT:

Some of us don't believe that to be true (the equipment will be fine). As such, I have proposed another 2 options, namely a 5 year or better warranty for hardware that does have a clock signal failure (since it shouldn't happen according to netgate, this should be a no brainer), or a proactive replacement.

I'd be interested to hear your reasoning as to why you or anyone else (really I want to hear from Netgate) are opposed to this.

Because then the company is saddled with an ongoing responsibility to deal with incoming claims, whether valid or not. E.g., if someone static zaps their board 4 years from now, netgate is going to have to deal with the claim that the c2xxx bug was the problem. They're going to have to either maintain spares and just hand them to anyone who asks for one, or keep people around who remember how to deal with a long-obsolete board, or they'll have to just give people free new computers whenever they ask for one. For something that's unlikely (with an unknown magnitude) that's excessive for a small company to commit to.

Repeat after me: cisco is only giving out free computers to people who are paying something around the parts value of a netgate firewall every year for maintenance. If I offered to replace your netgear routers proactively if you would agree to enter a 5 year $150/yr service contract, which would also cover future failures, would you take me up on that deal? Heck, if enough people say yes I'd actually consider it–there's a decent profit to be made.

Actually, if you offered me a SG-2440 for $100 a year (so $500 in 5 years) in a HaaS (Hardware as a service), I would consider it strongly. Heck, I already work with a company that does WaaS (Wireless as a Service) that does something similar.

To all those who say "well cisco is so expensive, blah blah blah… smartnet... "... well then maybe Netgate should charge more if more needs to be charged. Some of us rather pay a premium for a premium product and not worry then not pay that premium and then have to worry. The clients I service made that call when they picked me - I'm certainly not the cheapest one around (not even close).

@chpalmer:

@gcu_greyarea:

Netgate is continuing to sell these units.

Says you.  Ive seen no evidence of that either way.

Umm, you have seen no evidence that Netgate is continuing to sell these units?
May I redirect you to here? https://store.netgate.com/SG-2440.aspx

@VAMike:

@gcu_greyarea:

All of the above considered - Netgate still sold me a unit with a component that is likely to fail prematurely.

You have no real basis for your hysteria. Please cite a credible source for "likely to fail prematurely".

Absolutely. How about this pdf from Intel?
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/specification-updates/atom-c2000-family-spec-update.pdf
And I quote

AVR54.
System May Experience Inability to Boot or May Cease Operation
Problem:
The SoC LPC_CLKOUT0 and/or LPC_CLKOUT1 signals (Low Pin Count bus clock outputs) may stop functioning.
Implication:  If the LPC clock(s) stop functioning the system will no longer be able to boot

This PDF should establish the failure part. As for prematurely, well, the ettera wouldn't have been made if it was normal spec. I'm not sure where the 18 months number comes from that I have seen flying around… but I'm willing to bet it's source is credible.
As for the likely part - the only thing I can point to is all the other people who are pointing to failed systems.

EDIT: More credible sources:

Intel's Robert Holmes Swan, the new CFO and executive vice president, stated:

"But secondly, and a little bit more significant, we were observing a product quality issue in the fourth quarter with slightly higher expected failure rates under certain use and time constraints…"

[chpalmer]

@MordyT:

@chpalmer:

@gcu_greyarea:

Netgate is continuing to sell these units.

Says you.  Ive seen no evidence of that either way.

Umm, you have seen no evidence that Netgate is continuing to sell these units?
May I redirect you to here? https://store.netgate.com/SG-2440.aspx

My point is - Your assuming they haven't implemented the workaround or similar..

[gcu_greyarea]

https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=2297

"We apologize for the limited information available at this time. Due to confidentiality agreements, we are restricted in what we can discuss. We will communicate additional information as it becomes available.

As always, please be assured we will do the right thing for our customers at Netgate and the pfSense community."

So Netgate is unable to tell customers that their SG appliances have a fix for AVR54 because NDA's are in place with intel….? BS!

If Netgate had a fix - communicating this to customers would be top priority.

Just to be clear - I won't buy Netgate again!
The reason is not AVR54, but their attitude, lack of communication, lack of customer empathy and lack of ability to "put themselves into the customers' shoes".

[VAMike]

@MordyT:

This is veering off topic - you can speculate all you want on how we did our analysis, I won't get into that.

of course not, it's just some handwaving to make the process seem a lot more impressive than reality, while disregarding the fact that the only thing that changed was sensationalist reporting.

@VAMike:

Because then the company is saddled with an ongoing responsibility to deal with incoming claims, whether valid or not. E.g., if someone static zaps their board 4 years from now, netgate is going to have to deal with the claim that the c2xxx bug was the problem. They're going to have to either maintain spares and just hand them to anyone who asks for one, or keep people around who remember how to deal with a long-obsolete board, or they'll have to just give people free new computers whenever they ask for one. For something that's unlikely (with an unknown magnitude) that's excessive for a small company to commit to.

Repeat after me: cisco is only giving out free computers to people who are paying something around the parts value of a netgate firewall every year for maintenance. If I offered to replace your netgear routers proactively if you would agree to enter a 5 year $150/yr service contract, which would also cover future failures, would you take me up on that deal? Heck, if enough people say yes I'd actually consider it–there's a decent profit to be made.

Actually, if you offered me a SG-2440 for $100 a year (so $500 in 5 years) in a HaaS (Hardware as a service), I would consider it strongly. Heck, I already work with a company that does WaaS (Wireless as a Service) that does something similar.

Um, no, that's $150/yr on top of the hardware cost.

To all those who say "well cisco is so expensive, blah blah blah… smartnet... "... well then maybe Netgate should charge more if more needs to be charged. Some of us rather pay a premium for a premium product and not worry then not pay that premium and then have to worry.

So, basically, you just didn't notice that you bought a product with no annual service contract fee? I'd say that most people who bought from netgate consciously chose not to buy into that business model because it's most certainly available from other vendors. Maybe that careful analysis that you don't want to talk about missed some fundamentals?

@VAMike:

@gcu_greyarea:

All of the above considered - Netgate still sold me a unit with a component that is likely to fail prematurely.

You have no real basis for your hysteria. Please cite a credible source for "likely to fail prematurely".

Absolutely. How about this pdf from Intel?
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/specification-updates/atom-c2000-family-spec-update.pdf
And I quote

AVR54.
System May Experience Inability to Boot or May Cease Operation
Problem:
The SoC LPC_CLKOUT0 and/or LPC_CLKOUT1 signals (Low Pin Count bus clock outputs) may stop functioning.
Implication:  If the LPC clock(s) stop functioning the system will no longer be able to boot

This PDF should establish the failure part. As for prematurely, well, the ettera wouldn't have been made if it was normal spec. I'm not sure where the 18 months number comes from that I have seen flying around… but I'm willing to bet it's source is credible.

So, again, you don't actually have anything. The intel errata doesn't include any quantification of the failure rate. You don't know what sensationalist reporting told you it was 18 months before the hardware explodes, but you're sure it's credible. Right.

As for the likely part - the only thing I can point to is all the other people who are pointing to failed systems.

Really? Please cite. Because from everything in my experience and from what I've learned talking to people with very large c2xxx deployments, they are not failing in large numbers, even the ones which are 3+ years old.

EDIT: More credible sources:

Intel's Robert Holmes Swan, the new CFO and executive vice president, stated:

"But secondly, and a little bit more significant, we were observing a product quality issue in the fourth quarter with slightly higher expected failure rates under certain use and time constraints…"

I asked for a source for the assertion "a component that is likely to fail prematurely" and you quote "slightly higher expected failure rates under certain use and time constraints". "likely to fail" != "slightly higher…failure rates [with conditions]".

[chrcoluk]

I agree with the comments netgate should stick 2 fingers up at the NDA, they are the customer of intel and they want to keep your business, so intel will probably do jack about the NDA been breached.  I also think the NDA is technically illegal in various countries and contracts do not override law.

[garyd9]

@VAMike:

I asked for a source for the assertion "a component that is likely to fail prematurely" and you quote "slightly higher expected failure rates under certain use and time constraints". "likely to fail" != "slightly higher…failure rates [with conditions]".

I find it amusing that engineers are willing to blindly accept vague phrases such as "slightly higher expected failure rates…" without demanding something more specific.  This isn't directed at you, VAMike (your quote was just handy.)  It's just a general observation.  "slightly higher" can mean "0.00001% higher chance" or it can mean "40% higher chance."

I'm of the opinion that if it is "0.00001%", that Intel would come right out and say that in order to put their customers at ease.  The same train of thought suggests that the actual "higher chance" is much greater... at least a high enough percentage that Intel felt the need to hide the number  AND force anyone with an NDA to also hide the number.

Perhaps most telling is that not only is the issue costing Intel a significant enough amount of money that it has to be reported to shareholders, but also the speculation that this issue is causing delays in them ramping up the C3xxx lines.

Oh, and even netgate is using phrases that are so vague as to be meaningless (probably due to NDA.)  I believe someone from pfSense/Negate posted "The majority of at-risk Netgate products will not experience this failure over their entire service lifetime."  That statement didn't include what "service lifetime" means, and uses the term "the majority."  If 49.9% of the units experience this failure, the statement would still be accurate.

[VAMike]

@garyd9:

@VAMike:

I asked for a source for the assertion "a component that is likely to fail prematurely" and you quote "slightly higher expected failure rates under certain use and time constraints". "likely to fail" != "slightly higher…failure rates [with conditions]".

I find it amusing that engineers are willing to blindly accept vague phrases such as "slightly higher expected failure rates…" without demanding something more specific.  This isn't directed at you, VAMike (your quote was just handy.)  It's just a general observation.  "slightly higher" can mean "0.00001% higher chance" or it can mean "40% higher chance."

I'm of the opinion that if it is "0.00001%", that Intel would come right out and say that in order to put their customers at ease.  The same train of thought suggests that the actual "higher chance" is much greater... at least a high enough percentage that Intel felt the need to hide the number  AND force anyone with an NDA to also hide the number.

Well, I'm less of a conspiracy theorist and assume that means that the actual number is highly dependent on other factors, and that a blanket figure is meaningless. But hey, maybe the illuminati really are manipulating this thing. I guess you could demand harder. You could threaten to hold your breath until you turn blue. You could complain a lot on the internet. But it seems unlikely that anything you do here will make intel release specific failure rates for your device. Accept that and plan accordingly. I intend to use my avoton gear until it reaches obsolescence or until it stops working, and I'm not losing any sleep over it. I could probably get supermicro to RMA, but I don't have any deployed as SPOFs without redundancy–so the vague possibility of failure is much less significant than the guaranteed headache of having to bring stuff down, pull it apart, and deal with shipping. If some new data comes out to suggest that failure is imminent, I'll reevaluate.

If you really just can't live with a known unknown, throw the thing out, buy yourself unknown unknowns, and move on with your life.