Skip to content

NVLink/NVLS Failure with Xid 31 MMU Fault Cascade

NVLS collective failures on Hopper/NVLINK4 nodes cascade from Fabric Manager restarts, producing Xid 31 MMU page faults and illegal memory accesses across the node.

Quick answer

NVLS collective failures on Hopper/NVLINK4 nodes cascade from Fabric Manager restarts, producing Xid 31 MMU page faults and illegal memory accesses across the node.

Hardware#nvlink#nvls#xid-31#mmu-fault#fabric-manager#hopper

What this failure is

NVLink/NVLS Failure with Xid 31 MMU Fault Cascade is a Hardware failure seen during ML training runs. NVLS collective failures on Hopper/NVLINK4 nodes cascade from Fabric Manager restarts, producing Xid 31 MMU page faults and illegal memory accesses across the node. Common tags: Nvlink, Nvls, Xid 31, Mmu Fault.

Live diagnosis, no signup

Is this what broke your run? Paste your log.

You're reading about NVLink/NVLS Failure with Xid 31 MMU Fault Cascade. Paste your own crash log or traceback below and get the real root cause for YOUR run, not this generic entry. No account, no card. Logs are masked at ingress and never saved to account history.

training_logs.txt
No log to hand? Try one:

3 free diagnoses/day

Want 14 days on the Scale plan?

Request an evaluation code. A verified workplace organization activates up to 50 diagnoses a day, alerts, history, and follow-up questions. No credit card or automatic subscription.

Evaluate one incident

Why it happens (the mechanism)

Forceful Fabric Manager restarts leave NVLink/NVSwitch state inconsistent. MMU page-table (Xid 31) faults follow from the coherency loss. NVLS multicast mappings become invalid mid-operation. Taken together, these mechanisms explain why the failure is reproducible, why it tends to surface on specific workloads or scales, and why generic mitigation attempts often fall short without addressing the underlying cause.

What you'll observe

  • NCCL/NVLS operations fail across the whole node
  • Multiple frameworks (NCCL tests, HPL, TF) crash with related errors
  • Failures appear after a Fabric Manager restart

Common symptoms and what they mean

SymptomWhy it happens
transport/nvls.cc:244 NCCL WARN Cuda failure 1 'invalid argument'Forceful Fabric Manager restarts leave NVLink/NVSwitch state inconsistent
Xid (PCI:...): 31 ... MMU Fault: ENGINE GRAPHICS ... FAULT_PDE ACCESS_TYPE_VIRT_WRITEMMU page-table (Xid 31) faults follow from the coherency loss
an illegal memory access was encountered = 700NVLS multicast mappings become invalid mid-operation

Which systems are affected

  • 8x H100/H200 SXM nodes with NVLINK4 + NVSwitch
  • Jobs using NVLink SHARP (NVLS)
  • Nodes where Fabric Manager was restarted under load

How to confirm this is the problem

Use this checklist to test the hypothesis against a small reproduction. No single line proves the root cause, so preserve the preceding events and compare one variable at a time.

  • Reproduce the failure from a clean checkpoint/seed: the symptom must appear without warm-up state from a previous run.
  • Verified signal present: transport/nvls.cc:244 NCCL WARN Cuda failure 1 'invalid argument'
  • Verified signal present: Xid (PCI:...): 31 ... MMU Fault: ENGINE GRAPHICS ... FAULT_PDE ACCESS_TYPE_VIRT_WRITE
  • Verified signal present: an illegal memory access was encountered = 700
  • A targeted fix from the "How to fix it" section eliminates or substantially reduces the symptom within one validation pass.

The fix and the prevention pattern

The root cause is on this page and stays free. A free account adds the exact remediation steps, saved history, and the fix on every entry in the encyclopedia.

Sign up free. Unlock the full analysis

No credit card. Daily allowance follows verified trust tier. Instant access.

Xid 31 in context

Xid 31 is one of a small set of codes the NVIDIA driver uses to report GPU faults, and the number is most of the diagnosis: it tells you whether you are looking at your own code, the driver, or a board that needs replacing.

Compare every Xid code side by side

Diagnose this failure in VS Code

Select the traceback or open the failed terminal, then run Denpex locally to see the initiating rank, collateral failures, exact fix, and verification command without uploading the log.

Install the free VS Code extension

Root cause

  • Forceful Fabric Manager restarts leave NVLink/NVSwitch state inconsistent
  • MMU page-table (Xid 31) faults follow from the coherency loss
  • NVLS multicast mappings become invalid mid-operation

The fix and how to prevent it

Evaluate Denpex on your own logs

Request a Scale evaluation code. A verified workplace organization activates 14 days with up to 50 diagnoses a day. Every account keeps its current diagnosis allowance and gets a verification path. No card or automatic subscription.

We send a single-use code tied to that address. Static provider and TLD rules do not reject valid addresses. Account trust determines the benefit after signup.

Don't just read the fix, diagnose your run

The encyclopedia tells you what went wrong. Denpex tells you what went wrong in YOUR training run. With your logs, your config, and your stack.