I'm generally not very fond of reporting on security breaches or bugs, but OSNews reader and Mandriva employee Adam Williamson warned us of a pretty serious bug in pre-releases of the Linux kernel. "A major bug has been found in the e1000e module (which supports some Intel onboard ethernet adapters) in Linux kernel 2.6.27 pre-releases (up to and including 2.6.27rc7). It can cause the EEPROM of the adapter to become corrupted, rendering it non-functional. This may affect current pre-releases of distributions. Mandriva has posted a detailed notification about the issue, as has SUSE." So, watch out.
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2005-07-06
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2005-07-24
I haven't RTFA, but I have been generally following the situation. Apparently, trying to use Intel's utility to fix it sometimes helps and sometimes makes it worse. I've heard that a bios flash does fix it. YMMV. Thank God my 1000baseT is a crappy low end one! (I'm running an affected kernel.)
Member since:2005-07-06
Yes, as the MDV notification says, don't use ibautil.exe, it's really not a good idea. A BIOS flash apparently should usually fix it. If it doesn't, you should return to the manufacturer, unless you happened to take a backup of the good EEPROM data (we're all in the habit of backing up our EEPROMs, right? :>)
Member since:2005-07-07
I'm going to be now. I got hit by this in an Ubuntu alpha, and just don't have time to RMA until school gets out for summer.
I think the big issue is how some distributors are responding this. Every ISO with this issue should be pulled immediately, and new ones posted with either a fix or the module removed, not just blacklisted. There's a debate about this in the Ubuntu bug report right now.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/263555
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Member since:2006-09-27
Hmm, interesting :p
Jeffrey, we can't afford to do that; we need to be able to test with the Alpha CDs on the wide variety of hardware not affected by this bug, or our development schedules for 8.10 will be seriously compromised. However, I'd be happy to add a warning to the cdimage web pages. Can anyone suggest some text?