Re: sky2 fails when memory exceeds 2GB on amd64 kernel

Stephen,

Debian received this bug report on sky2:

Dale Schroeder wrote:

No matter what brand, size, or speed of ddr2 RAM I try, I cannot 
successfully boot when the installed memory is greater than 2GB.
The system is an Acer Aspire M1100 with the most recent BIOS.  I have 
tried with kernels 2.6.32-5 and 2.6.30-8squeeze1.

During the boot sequence, sky2 fails with a 0x2010 pci error; then 
several programs slowly load until dmsg appears, at which time the 
screen fills with hexadecimal errors similar to those in this debian bug 
thread:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=457967

Disabling the network interface in the BIOS allows bootup to finish, 
although some programs fail to load due to the missing network connection.
Decreasing the RAM to 2GB returns booting to normal.

I've seen numerous references to bugs with this network hardware and the 
amd64 kernel, but none related to adding extra memory.  I am unaware as 
to how I can capture the errors, since I cannot finish the boot process 
when the errors happen.

Further information:

I tested another network card, a Netgear GA311 which uses the r8169 driver.
With this card, all 4GB of memory is recognized and the system 
successfully boots.
This would seem to rule out the BIOS and points to sky2 on the Marvell 
m/b chip
being my problem.

Obviously, the new card doesn't resolve the bug, but it does solve my 
problem.

Does this sound like a plausible symptom of the bugs fixed by:

f6815077e75c5b7f55b56fc3788e328514d4e72a sky2: fix transmit DMA map leakage
3fbd9187d004149fb8a98c9cb51ef9f4a4f66aca sky2: hand receive DMA mapping failures

In any case, are the above suitable for 2.6.32-stable (once merged by
Linus)?

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
73.46% of all statistics are made up.