On 1/6/06, ODonnell, Michael <[email protected]> wrote:
> [ 2nd transmission. Microsoft mailer "helpfully"
> reformatted the patch in the last one... :-( ]
>
> Greetings,
>
> We have identified two related bugs in the e100 driver and we request
> that they be repaired in the official Intel version of the driver.
>
> Both bugs are related to manipulation of the MDI control register.
>
> The first problem is that the Ready bit is being ignored when
> writing to the Control register; we noticed this because the Linux
> bonding driver would occasionally come to the spurious conclusion
> that the link was down when querying Link State. It turned out
> that by failing to wait for a previous command to complete it was
> selecting what was essentially a random register in the MDI register
> set. When we added code that waits for the Ready bit (as shown in
> the patch file below) all such problems ceased.
damn, you know I had seen this on one machine only, and the machine
had other problems, so i thought it wasn't e100. I can't quite figure
out why we haven't seen this more often given how long the bug appears
to have existed.
> The second problem is that, although access to the MDI registers
> involves multiple steps which must not be intermixed, nothing was
> defending against two or more threads attempting simultaneous access.
> The most obvious situation where such interference could occur
> involves the watchdog versus ioctl paths, but there are probably
> others, so we recommend the locking shown in our patch file.
Agreed, but once again I am simply amazed this has been there so long.
I think these are both good patches and I'll ack this and absorb it
for our next release. It will be a bit before its completely through
our process but its okay with me if this goes into the kernel now.
Jesse
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