On 1/6/06, ODonnell, Michael <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [ 2nd transmission. Microsoft mailer "helpfully" > reformatted the patch in the last one... :-( ] > > Greetings, > > We have identified two related bugs in the e100 driver and we request > that they be repaired in the official Intel version of the driver. > > Both bugs are related to manipulation of the MDI control register. > > The first problem is that the Ready bit is being ignored when > writing to the Control register; we noticed this because the Linux > bonding driver would occasionally come to the spurious conclusion > that the link was down when querying Link State. It turned out > that by failing to wait for a previous command to complete it was > selecting what was essentially a random register in the MDI register > set. When we added code that waits for the Ready bit (as shown in > the patch file below) all such problems ceased.
damn, you know I had seen this on one machine only, and the machine had other problems, so i thought it wasn't e100. I can't quite figure out why we haven't seen this more often given how long the bug appears to have existed. > The second problem is that, although access to the MDI registers > involves multiple steps which must not be intermixed, nothing was > defending against two or more threads attempting simultaneous access. > The most obvious situation where such interference could occur > involves the watchdog versus ioctl paths, but there are probably > others, so we recommend the locking shown in our patch file. Agreed, but once again I am simply amazed this has been there so long. I think these are both good patches and I'll ack this and absorb it for our next release. It will be a bit before its completely through our process but its okay with me if this goes into the kernel now. Jesse - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html