US Patent 7624305 Failure isolation in a communication system

A computer system including a communication fabric initiates a forced diagnostic to isolate and identify genuine error conditions which are discerned from sympathetic error conditions. Error counters are only incremented for each genuine error condition, precluding the need to set error counter threshold artificially high. Recovery events are logged in a recovery table and recovery actions are only initiated after the diagnoses processes is complete. This prevents duplication of recovery actions and the unnecessary implementation of low-level recovery actions when they will be followed by higher-level recovery actions.