e1000e Bug Squashed — Linux Kernel Patch Released 111
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!"
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
An alpha/beta of the most recent linux kernel patch had a bug fixed, and it hits the front page?
They have not fixed the bug that caused the e1000e ethernet cards to get bricked. This is at least a two part bug. The EEPROM should not have been writable and Something Is Happening to cause bad writes to happen. What that "Something" is, no one knows yet, though it appears they are getting close.
Linus is an absolute, total anal retentive with regards to fixing bugs by understanding and fixing the root cause[1], not just papering over it. This papers over it for the moment, because the bug hasn't been isolated yet, but it allows more people to participate because the side effects were really nasty - this was a true bricking of the ethernet card.
This stage isn't newsworthy for Slashdot.[2] It must be a slow news day.
[1] This is a Good Thing.
[2] Nor will the real bug fix when it comes. A bug is found, a bug is fixed. Life, goes on.
Re:e1000 been broken a while (Score:5, Informative)
3com used to be that way too. I'm not exactly sure what it was but the 3c905's rocked and would run data quite a bit faster then any other card at the time. I know they had a full blown data processors on the cards but I assume the others would to. I used to go to computer shows just to pick them up for $10-$20 used because they had the same effects on data performance as you would see with rendering going from a S3 trident video adapter to a Gforce video card. I because seriously convinced when at a lan party with an AMD Athlon 800 system running windows 98se with 256 memory and we had to pull a 100 meg file from a file server to get the updates in sync to a game to play. I started pulling the file last because of helping others find it, I was on the tail end of the 3rd tire of uplinked switches and I had the file installed while others were still transering it. The funny part is that people with their brand new Windows XP 1.4 and 1.8 gig plus systems were still slower and the only thing I can attribute to it is the NIC.
Intel caught up with 3com in this aspect and despite my older fascinations with 3com, I'm actually an Intel fan in this one respect now.
Re:Hardware of Software Problem? (Score:3, Informative)
ATA is an abstraction (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Hardware of Software Problem? (Score:3, Informative)
It is not uncommon to require a set of magic numbers to be written before writing to protected memory. The magic numbers and/or access pattern is designed so that no simple or likely hardware failure will allow unprotected access. Small discrete or integrated EEPROMs often have this functionality built in.