Hi Brandeburg, Jesse wrote: > Thanks for the detailed timeline, I will try to be looking into this or > coordinating my team looking into this next Tuesday.
With some further thinking about that, it's worth mentioning that the Intel graphics driver bug caused some X lockups, which to begin with I was "fixing" by hard rebooting the machine, although it later transpired that I could just SSH in and kill -9 the X server. This got my thinking - what with the OOPs during boot and the X driver (which has very low level access to system memory) problems, it's very likely that there were rogue pointers in the kernel. Over the weekend I was linked[0] to a rant by someone using an Intel gigE driver on OpenBSD. He suggested that the lan firmware is mapped writable all the time and that his firmware had been corrupted when something went bad in his kernel and his machine crashed. Is this the case for the Linux driver also? If so it seems like a very dangerous strategy. You mentioned that you're pretty sure it's not the driver, which may well be true directly, but if it has mapped the firmware as writable memory then anything else in the kernel which goes wrong and starts spewing data all over the place could easily obliterate the firmware, no? > Even if we figure out what is going wrong and reproduce it I don't think > I can directly help you get your LAN part to show back up. Somehow you Since the driver does seem to have some ability to write to the firmware, would it be possible to produce tools which can: a) back up the firmware b) restore it That way I can take a backup as soon as I get my machine back from Lenovo, and then restore that firmware the next time this happens. I'm very tempted to steer clear of 2.6.27 because I don't want to be RMAing the laptop every week, but at the same time I want to be sure that this is unable to happen in future, and that .27 doesn't get released with this. > Did you try running IBM's diagnostics programs? They have PC-Doctor > bootable CDs but I don't know what they get up to. Their PC Doctor CD shows the Ethernet diagnostics as unavailable, which is hardly surprising if the device doesn't appear on the PCI bus. Lenovo are going to replace the motherboard (I didn't particularly want to tell them they just need to reflash the LAN firmware, since they might refuse to help me, what with my running a pre-release version of an unsupported OS. > We may need to start talking to LKML soon to make sure this is tracked > at that level in case it is a kernel problem of some kind. I have to say that I think this should be messaged fairly widely and clearly, given that there don't seem to be easy recovery options. [0] http://www.blahonga.org/~art/rant.html - search for em0. It's not a particularly charming posting, and I don't wish to suggest that I share his sentiments ;) Cheers, -- Chris Jones [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.canonical.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ E1000-devel mailing list E1000-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/e1000-devel
