How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly)

Posted Nov 4, 2008 6:19 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159)
In reply to: How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly) by BrucePerens
Parent article: How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever (O'Reilly)

The firmware corruption bug was for the wired gigabit ethernet driver (e1000e), so shouldn't be a problem.

That said, the problem code that was writing to the firmware (dynamic ftrace) could easily have been stomping over other drivers' IO space in a way that causes malfunctions but not firmware destruction. There were reports of ipw3945 hangs during boot on beta versions of Ubuntu 8.10 that stopped occuring when the dynamic ftrace code was disabled, so that is certainly something to keep in mind.