On 8/19/2025 8:10 PM, Timo Teras wrote:
On Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:43:26 +0300
Vitaly Lifshits <[email protected]> wrote:
The K1 state reduces power consumption on ICH family network
controllers during idle periods, similarly to L1 state on PCI Express
NICs. Therefore, it is recommended and enabled by default.
However, on some systems it has been observed to have adverse side
effects, such as packet loss. It has been established through debug
that the problem may be due to firmware misconfiguration of specific
systems, interoperability with certain link partners, or marginal
electrical conditions of specific units.
These problems typically cannot be fixed in the field, and generic
workarounds to resolve the side effects on all systems, while keeping
K1 enabled, were found infeasible.
Therefore, add the option for users to globally disable K1 idle state
on the adapter.
Thanks for adding this!
However, as a user, I find it inconvenient if the default setting
results in a subtly broken system on a device I just from a store.
Since this affects devices from multiple large vendors, would it be
possible to add some kind of quirk mechanism to automatically enable
this on known "bad" systems. Perhaps something based on the DMI or other
system specific information. Could something like this be implemented?
At least in my use case I have multiple e1000e using laptops on the
same link partner working, and only one broken device for which I
reported this issue. So at least on my experience the issue relates to
specific system primarily (perhaps also requiring a specific link
partner for the issue to show up).
Thanks!
Hi Timo,
Unfortunately, there is no visible configuration that allows the driver
to reliably identify problematic systems.
If in the future we find such data, then we can improve the workaround
and make it automatic.
At present, the user-controlled interface is the best we have.
