On 4/14/07, Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Note: Ingo also reports what looks like a memory corruption due to the 6b6b6b6b pattern on presumably the same box. The 6b6b6b6b pattern is POISON_FREE, implying some kind of slab misuse, most likely a use-after-free, although possibly just due to overrunning a slab into the next one or something like that. What I'm leading up to is that I'm wondering if these mysterious network driver bugs aren't due to the network drivers themselves, but due to some higher-level problem. I think the hangs that Ingo sees with forcedeth were preceded by mysterious and "impossible" NULL pointer oopses. Ingo? Davem - have there been network infrastructure changes that migt be suspect? Jeff and/or Greg - anything in the generic network driver/device driver level? We had some trouble earlier with the transition to the driver core, and kref miscounting. Related? The last Oops Ingo saw was a module refcounting one, iirc. It does seem networking related somehow. Yeah, it could be obviously be a combination of independent bugs both in e1000/ and forcedeth drivers, but maybe there is something in common here...
I don't know if this is a red herring or not but I reported on March 13th slab corruption and it looked like file_free_rcu - these are fairly recent changes I think (rcu)? Anyway original message is at http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/3/12/364 My apologies if this is not related. Ian -- Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4/ Blog: http://iansblog.jandi.co.nz WAND Network Research Group - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
