On Thu, 25 Sep 2008, Dave Airlie wrote:
> Well I'm out of the race, my attempts to re-write my eeprom using an
> eeprom from an equivalent laptop have totally failed and my BIOS won't
> boot anymore - so my laptop is == a brick.
Uh oh. Shouldn't we put something like the patch below in Linus' tree
unless we get this sorted out? Otherwise more and more people who use -rc
kernels will run into this, and will get their hardware [hopefully
temporarily, but not all users are able to re-flash their network card
EEPROMs, right] bricked.
I know that it is quite aggressive and is going to disable wired
networking on a lot of systems that have been functioning properly,
therefore RFC ...
From: Jiri Kosina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [PATCH] [RFC] E1000E: temporarily disable e1000e driver
E1000E: temporarily disable e1000e driver
There is a serious bug somewhere, that renders e1000e network cards
unusable on certain hardware configurations by rewriting EEPROM with 0xff
all over. Debugging this is not trivial, because:
- it is not yet even clear whether the bug is caused by userspace (new
version of xorg drivers, bad interaction with PAT, ...) or some bug in
kernel code; it's even not yet certain at which exact combination of
software versions and hardware configuration this started to trigger
- you have only one attempt to test potential fix. If the fix doesn't
work, the eeprom of the card is hosed
and therefore fixing this has potential to take some time.
The tool that will safely restore the previous contents of EEPROM is
currently being written, but even this is not trivial (Dave Airlie has
turned his notebook into brick while trying to restore the EEPROM
contents).
Let's therefore mark this driver as broken (though it is very well
possible that this particular driver is not at fault at all) until this
gets resolved, so that users of -rc kernels don't get their network cards
totally unusable.
References (information about sw/hw configurations of affected systems
might be found in the bugzillas):
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/8/8/123
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/22/23
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11382
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=425480
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=459202
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/263555
https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=44147
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---
diff --git a/drivers/net/Kconfig b/drivers/net/Kconfig
index 4a11296..2d7a7f2 100644
--- a/drivers/net/Kconfig
+++ b/drivers/net/Kconfig
@@ -1938,7 +1938,7 @@ config E1000_DISABLE_PACKET_SPLIT
config E1000E
tristate "Intel(R) PRO/1000 PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet support"
- depends on PCI && (!SPARC32 || BROKEN)
+ depends on PCI && BROKEN
---help---
This driver supports the PCI-Express Intel(R) PRO/1000 gigabit
ethernet family of adapters. For PCI or PCI-X e1000 adapters,
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