Re: [RFC PATCH 07/12] e1000e: debug contention on NVM SWFLAG

[Olaf Kirch]

On Thursday 02 October 2008 18:27:12 Brandeburg, Jesse wrote:
> so, why now?  Drivers since before the e1000/e1000e split had this same
> code, with no reports of problems.  This code has been heavily tested,
> and one of the platforms easily reproducing this has been available for
> 3 years now (ich8), with code that is basically unchanged in the driver.

Possibly the dhcp client is doing something differently, or at a much higher
frequency. At any rate, it seems we're seeing this now even when we just
use init level 3, without X involvement. Karsten reports NVM corruption
after 34 reboots into init level 3.

> The flash control registers are documented in the ICH documentation, and
> are located at physical memory location indicated by BAR1 in the config
> space of device 0:19.0
> 
> I wonder if we couldn't put a check in to see if the value we end up
> reading from the register controlling the operation matches the
> operation we were expecting (read vs write vs block erase)

That may help, yes.

Olaf
-- 
Neo didn't bring down the Matrix. SOA did.
				--soafacts.com

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