From: "Dave Airlie" <airlied@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:45:46 +1000 > I'm still dubious about this, wouldn't we see other wierdass side > effects if X was trashing the BARs on other devices? Sure. My theory is that it's a recent xorg change causing this, so I've been going through GIT history for xserver, libpciaccess, and the intel driver for the past year looking for clues. If there is usually a gap after the video device, there would just be no response from the PCI bus, and the way that's handled is chipset specific. At least a while back, most x86 systems would silently ignore writes and return all 1's in such a case, but they may be generating bus error events these days. I simply don't know. > I think tglx is on the right path, same problem as e1000, code is > stupid, it can reenter the nvram read/write code from irq > context, and pwn itself. The e1000e side here is reproducable way too easily for it to be the same case, as far as I see it. The e1000 driver has probably had this problem for years and we've only recently had some concrete cases of it triggering. Also, what utility are you running on your system that is even accessing the NVRAM on the e1000e card? Knowing that might help us understand why this problem has appeared now. Maybe there is some diagnostic or monitoring tool that is now becoming prevalent in these distributions where it triggers. This problem started happening seemingly "all of a sudden", even to people who have been keeping sort-of recent with their kernels, such as yourself. Yet we can't get any sense yet what range of kernel versions are in use when the problem triggers. I'm about to leave for a week or so in Paris for the netfilter workshop, so I hope that someone other than myself will do some data mining like I have instead of (merely) tossing theories around and finger pointing. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kernel-testers" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
