Re: [bug] e100 bug: checksum mismatch on 82551ER rev10


Molle Bestefich wrote:

Auke Kok wrote:

If you have received a motherboard or card with a broken EEPROM then your card is in a limbo state - it might work but results are unreliable and may cause your entire system to break (and even data
corruption).

Sure, and on the other hand, it might work (seemingly) perfectly, as it has done in the past, and will continue to do so as long as the owner wishes it to.

You should contact the hardware vendor and have the board replaced or
upgraded with a proper EEPROM. Continuing to work with the corrupted
EEPROM image that you have now can seriously hurt you later on.

Or a driver change can hurt me *right now*, by leaving my system without connectivity.

Every single IP130 I've had my hands on has had an EEPROM that the
Linux driver declared bad.

I'm now seeing this problem with a Thinkpad T23. I have a second T23 I can test, and will try to do so tonight.

I second the request to at least have a driver option to ignore checksum failures.

Auke said earlier:

The NICs are working perfectly.

How can you tell? Do you know if jumbo frames work correctly? Is the
device properly checksumming? is flow control working properly? These
and many, many more settings are determined by the EEPROM. Seemingly it
may work correctly, but there is no guarantee whatsoever that it will work
correctly at all if the checksum is bad. Again, you can lose data, or
worse, you could corrupt memory in the system causing massive failure (DMA
timings, etc). Unlikely? sure, but not impossible.

Let's assume that these things are all true, and the NIC currently does not work perfectly, just imperfectly, but acceptably. With the recent driver change, it now does not work at all. That's surely a bug in the driver.

---
Charlie
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