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List:       bonding-devel
Subject:    [Bonding-devel] Re: [PATCH] corruption during e100 MDI register access
From:       Andrew Morton <akpm () osdl ! org>
Date:       2006-01-09 13:00:30
Message-ID: 20060109050030.77a3104d.akpm () osdl ! org
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"ODonnell, Michael" <Michael.ODonnell@stratus.com> wrote:
>
> We have identified two related bugs in the e100 driver and we request
>  that they be repaired in the official Intel version of the driver.
> 
>  Both bugs are related to manipulation of the MDI control register.
> 
>  The first problem is that the Ready bit is being ignored when
>  writing to the Control register; we noticed this because the Linux
>  bonding driver would occasionally come to the spurious conclusion
>  that the link was down when querying Link State.  It turned out
>  that by failing to wait for a previous command to complete it was
>  selecting what was essentially a random register in the MDI register
>  set.  When we added code that waits for the Ready bit (as shown in
>  the patch file below) all such problems ceased.
> 
>  The second problem is that, although access to the MDI registers
>  involves multiple steps which must not be intermixed, nothing was
>  defending against two or more threads attempting simultaneous access.
>  The most obvious situation where such interference could occur
>  involves the watchdog versus ioctl paths, but there are probably
>  others, so we recommend the locking shown in our patch file.

Your patches are coming through wordwrapped.  Please fix your email client
in future.

Please also prepare patches in `patch -p1' form. 
http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/stuff/tpp.txt may prove useful.

This patch potentially spins for four milliseconds with interrupts off,
which will be unpopular.  Is there no alternative?

Anyway, I queued the patch in my kernel so the issue won't be forgotten
about.  I also queued a patch which makes your patch comply with kernel
coding style - it wasn't very close at all.

Thanks.


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