"Juan Fco. Giordana" <[email protected]> posted
[email protected], excerpted below, on  Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:06:43
-0300:

> I'm using the driver e1000e for these NICs since it's the one suggested
> for these Intel cards and I've found lot of information about a problem
> on this driver that leads to the the firmware being corrupted. I don't
> think I'm affected though since the first card is working properly and
> I've dumped the eprom for both adapters and they doesn't show any
> difference.

On the corrupted firmware bit, the problem ultimately was a combination 
of the dunder-headed hardware/firmware implementation (blindly accepting 
any random write as new firmware without even verifying a checksum!), now 
corrected in newer firmware I believe, and a bug in ftrace.  If you never 
had the ftrace kernel option turned on in kernels you ran on that 
hardware, as is presumably the case with production server hardware, or 
if you had it turned on but only in kernels AFTER the fix, the single 
known triggering bug vector will have never been available, so it's very 
unlikely you have it.

LWN article: The source of the e1000e corruption bug:
http://lwn.net/Articles/304105/

Other than that, I don't have any direct experience with that hardware, 
so I'm not going to be of much help, I'm afraid.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman


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