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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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
Member since:
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.)