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Fetching a transceiver's part info shouldn't fail silently

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
networking

Research direction

Start in dpd/src/link.rs around lines 1735-1750, where the transceiver MPN is fetched and later used. Trace the identification failure path and review nearby logging conventions. Done means a failed transceiver identification is recorded instead of passing silently, while preserving the existing reconciliation behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

In #104, a customer link failed to come all the way up, because the part-specific overrides for the transceiver's equalization settings were never applied. The underlying issue was likely #111, where we incorrectly marked a transceiver as unsupported too aggressively. Because of that, we failed to fetch the transceiver's MPN, and thus failed to look up the alternate equalization settings.

That's all fine in some sense, because of the link-reconciliation process in Dendrite, that continually tries to apply all the link settings, including these equalization settings. But we have no actual smoking gun proving #111 is the source of the error, because we silently fail in this case. Here, for example:

https://github.com/oxidecomputer/dendrite/blob/6ba23e71121c196e1e3c4e0621ba7a6f046237c7/dpd/src/link.rs#L1735-L1750

We're fetching the MPN, and later using it, but none of that code logs the fact that the transceiver couldn't be identified. We should do that, to ensure that this case doesn't pass silently in the future.

Dominant language
Rust
Stars
21
Forks
3
Avg merge
8h 29m
Merged PRs (30d)
2

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