[eepro100] Re: system hangs @ boot-time when bringing up eth0

[Andrey Savochkin]

Derek,

On Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 12:31:12AM -0400, Derek Glidden wrote:
[snip]
> I hate to be such a squeaky wheel on this issue, but it is literally
> costing my company time and money everytime someone has to drive out to
> physically reset a remote machine that did not come up on boot because
> the EEPro initialization has hung.  And probably is going to cost us
> even more time and money either replacing a bunch of previously-stable
> eepro cards with something else or trying to back-rev the kernels on all
> our boxes to a known-stable version.

I don't consider the issue as so serious.
Each time you upgrade the kernel you take some risk, so you must be prepared
to revert to the previous kernel quickly.  Or you may ask what's the problem
and be advised how to work-around it in a most convenient way or which driver
versions to pick up.

Certainly, I regret that the driver has the defect and the inconvenience it
caused, but the issue doesn't worth more than a short complain :-)

> I have gotten notes back that this is a "known issue" but no reasonable
> solution for it yet.  I can understand if Intel does not want to release
> full specs for the card to resolve it entirely, but at the same time, I
> don't understand why I've only recently begun seeing this problem.  And
> I *know* that it is only recently cropped up in the "stable" 2.2 kernel
> series because the frequency at which we see it *guarantees* that we
> would have seen it *at least once* with earlier kernel/driver versions. 
> So something has changed to a previously stable driver to make it
> extremely unstable.  (And in the kernel "stable" branch no less...)  I'm

I believe (however, not absolutely sure without the documentation) that the
bug has existed in the driver for a very long time, a few years.
The sporadic faults started to appear only recently because the operation
timings were changed by innocent and unrelated changes.

> more curious whatever the driver *was* doing still can't be done that
> way, since it seemed to work.  

Best regards
					Andrey V.
					Savochkin