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 <jkosina@xxxxxxx> 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 <jkosina@xxxxxxx> --- 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, -- 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
