Re: [RFC PATCH 02/12] On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, David Miller wrote:

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 4:28 PM, Jesse Brandeburg
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 2:45 PM, Jiri Kosina [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Karsten has been testing kernel with these three patches from the series
applied:

       e1000e: reset swflag after resetting hardware
       e1000e: fix lockdep issues
       e1000e: debug contention on NVM SWFLAG

This was done on a hardware which previously triggered the bug in just a
few test iterations in quite a reliable way. Now, with these patches
applied, the EEPROM corruption didn't happen after several tens of
iterations.

Please note, that the patch that disables the writes to EEPROM on hardware
level was *not* involved in this testing.

Therefore it currently seems that these three patches really address the
race condition issue that was present in the e1000e driver.

Our experience is different.  We are also testing with the "protection
patch" reverted.

We see that the problem specifically comes and goes when
removing/adding the use of set_memory_ro/set_memory_rw to the driver.

I'm working to catch the bad element in the act with a hardware
breakpoint or an ITP (we're trying both)

quoted

It is still not clear why the bug started triggering all of a sudden for
so many people though.

we plan to keep on working on this until we understand what is going on.

I removed the bad addresses from the cc: list