[Bug 37784] Re: sky2 ethernet driver is freezing on big upload

[maco]

----- Original Message -----
> Problem here too.  Ever since dapper... What's up with that?
> 
> -- 
> sky2 ethernet driver is freezing on big upload
> 
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> of the bug.

"What's up with that" is that the dev is unable to reproduce the bug (see:http://developer.osdl.org/shemminger/blog/?p=34 ) .  The driver works perfectly on his hardware.  Additionally, he wrote the driver while under an NDA, so there are no public specifications available for anyone else to fix the driver unless they reverse engineer the Windows one.  There are only two ways (that I can think of) to fix it:
1. Get a card that has issues with sky2 and give it to the Hemminger to work with.  I thought about doing this because I only use wired connections at school (have wifi at home...and thanks to this bug + having Centrino, I have the odd case of better wifi than wired on Linux), but it turns out it's onboard (unlike the wireless which is just mini-pci), so unless I sent my whole laptop, it'd be impossible.
2. Someone with this issue either admits that they have the expertise or gains the expertise to reverse engineer the Windows driver and see what's going wrong.  I'm guessing it's something to do with memory/buffers, and also guessing the Windows driver would have those numbers in it.  Then they can either give the information to Hemminger or, if they're comfortable with messing around in kernelspace, try to fix the driver on their own.

At this point, I'm considering #2 as a possibility (I suspect that all Marvell Yukon 2 cards are onboard).  I don't know how to do any of that stuff, but I have a copy of Linux Device Drivers 3 (which I got because I want to write a driver to make a USB device I have work), the text of which is available at http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/ for anyone else wanting a look (it's released CC-SA, so that's legal, but I like having real books for offline-coding-time, like on 8-hour train-rides).  Like I said, though, fixing it up would require reverse engineering the driver.  If anyone else is willing to try to figure this out, that'd be great.  Two (or three, or four...) heads are better than one, and someone on this bug report probably has a lot more C experience than I do.  I'm not really comfortable messing around in kernelspace, but I don't see it getting fixed unless one of us gets fed up and does it, so I'll read and ask questions of a few kernel hackers I know, and if anyone wa
nts to join me on the bug-hunt, maybe as a group we can figure out the problem and patch it.

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sky2 ethernet driver is freezing on big upload
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/37784
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