Re: e1000e NVM corruption issue status

[Karsten Keil <kkeil@suse.de>]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 07:01:21PM -0700, Brandeburg, Jesse wrote:
> > We have a series of kernel patches that I will reply to this mail with 
> > that may help users willing to test.
> 
> this is the current set of patches that I have to help us debug
> and/or fix e1000e issues found during this debug effort for
> the corrupt NVM.  the "drop stats lock" - "reset swflag" patches allow 
> Thomas' patch for a mutex in the SWFLAG acquire function to run without 
> any errors.
> 
> the patches are not probably production quality, but seem to work
> for myself and thomas on at least a couple of machines.
> 
> The non-debug aspects of the patches will likely be pushed later.
> 
> At this point I do not believe any of these patches will fix the
> NVM corruption issue, but will add to the ability of any tester
> to help find the issue, and reduce the chance that it is any issue we 
> (now) know about.
> 

A kernel with this these patches load the e1000e driver fine on
a test machine which has a OK NVM checksum.

But it freeze on one machine which has a wrong checksum.

On this machine the NVM seems to be OK, but the NVM valid bit
is cleared. If I would set this bit, the NVM checksum would be OK
again. This is the T61 notebook which did show this error after
openSUSE 11.1 Beta1 install after a reboot during X setup. 


-- 
Karsten Keil
SuSE Labs
ISDN and VOIP development
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