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Problem with axdevice --refresh causing NVMe drives to be stopped on a running system

Related products:AI Software
  • August 20, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 85 views

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Putting this up for folk who may hit a similar issue.

If you have a machine which has a single root PCIe device, where the output of lspci -tv looks something like this;

alsutton@svr204:~$ lspci -tv
-[0000:00]-+-00.0 Intel Corporation 8th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers
+-02.0 Intel Corporation CoffeeLake-S GT2 [UHD Graphics 630]
+-08.0 Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th/8th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
+-14.0 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH USB 3.1 xHCI Host Controller
+-14.2 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH Shared SRAM
+-16.0 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH HECI Controller
+-1b.0-[01]----00.0 Micron/Crucial Technology P2 [Nick P2] / P3 / P3 Plus NVMe PCIe SSD (DRAM-less)
+-1f.0 Intel Corporation B360 Chipset LPC/eSPI Controller
+-1f.3 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH cAVS
+-1f.4 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SMBus Controller
+-1f.5 Intel Corporation Cannon Lake PCH SPI Controller
\-1f.6 Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (7) I219-V

You need to be very careful running `axdevice --refresh`.

I’ve got two machines that, by default, present the pci device tree in this way, and running `axdevice --refresh` triggered the NVMe drive to be disconnected from the system, resulting in filesystem corruption, which put the whole system into a read-only mode.

It would be awesome if someone could update the axdevice script to only affect Axelera devices, and yes, this is a machine with the card installed, it just hasn’t been detected.

3 replies

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Axelera Team
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  • Axelera Team
  • September 4, 2025

Hi ​@alsutton! Sorry for the delay in responding to this, but I wanted to wait until the new update was live so it made more sense!

So, the good news is it’s now resolved. As you discovered, the previous SDK versions could cause issues if axdevice --refresh was run on systems where non-Axelera devices (like NVMe drives or what not) sit behind the same PCIe bridge.

In the latest Voyager SDK & Metis firmware v1.4, --refresh now handles PCIe bridges more safely. The first step is an update to both the SDK and board firmware (instructions are here if needed)

Thanks for your patience with this Al, and it’d be great to know if it solves things in action! 


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Axelera Team
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  • Axelera Team
  • September 4, 2025
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  • Ensign
  • December 19, 2025