[eepro100] Kernel oops with eepro100? Can this be confirmed?

Matthew Callaway matt@kindjal.net
Thu Jul 11 00:53:20 2002


Thank you for the pointers, and thank you for all the hard work on the
drivers.  I'll try your official driver and see if it makes a difference.  I
apologize for contacting you about a driver that has since deviated from
your code.

I realize that the evidence is circumstancial at best, but it's all I have
to go on.

It seems to me that if it were a user space process dereferencing a NULL
pointer, I'd get a segfault, not a kernel oops.  But I know nothing of these
things.

Thanks again,

Matt


----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald Becker" <becker@scyld.com>
To: "Matthew Callaway" <matt@kindjal.net>
Cc: <eepro100@scyld.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 6:51 PM
Subject: Re: [eepro100] Kernel oops with eepro100? Can this be confirmed?


> On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Matthew Callaway wrote:
>
> > I have a GNU/Linux distribution that runs on two different hardware
> > platforms.  One of them has a motherboard with two built in Intel
> > network interfaces that use the eepro100 driver, the other does not.
> > The platform using the eepro100 driver oopses about once a week under
> > little to no load.
>
> Try the driver at
>   http://www.scyld.com/network/eepro100.html
>      ftp://www.scyld.com/pub/network/eepro100.c
>
> > The boxes pass memtest86-3.0, which leads me to
> > believe that the culprit is the eepro100 driver.
>
> ... however there is little reason to believe that this problem is
> caused by the driver.
>
> > Can anyone confirm that this is possible based on the following output?
> >
> > This is a stock 2.2.20 kernel with the included eepro100 driver:
> >
> > static const char *version = "eepro100.c:v1.09j-t 9/29/99 Donald Becker
http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/eepro100.html\n"
>
> Grrrrr, that's not a real release number, and CESDIS was shut down years
> ago.
>
> > "eepro100.c: $Revision: 1.20.2.10 $ 2000/05/31 Modified by Andrey V.
Savochkin <saw@saw.sw.com.sg> and others\n"
> > "eepro100.c: VA Linux custom, Dragan Stancevic <visitor@valinux.com>
2000/11/15\n";
>
> ...with many unsupported modifications.
>
> > Jul 10 12:41:49 hostname kernel: Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer
> > Jul 10 12:41:49 hostname kernel: current->tss.cr3 = 05688000, %cr3 =
05688000
> > Jul 10 12:41:49 hostname kernel: *pde = 00000000
> > Jul 10 12:41:49 hostname kernel: Oops: 0002
> > Jul 10 12:41:49 hostname kernel: CPU:    0
> > Jul 10 12:41:49 hostname kernel: EIP:    0010:[sys_open+100/148]
>
> That's not a valid instruction pointer.  This looks more like a process
> is trying to exect a NULL function deference, which isn't likely caused
> by the driver.
>
> --
> Donald Becker becker@scyld.com
> Scyld Computing Corporation http://www.scyld.com
> 410 Severn Ave. Suite 210 Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
> Annapolis MD 21403 410-990-9993
>
>