Re: Linux 2.4.37.3

[Michael Tokarev]

Willy Tarreau wrote:
> Linux 2.4.37.3 has just been released.
[]
> The second major issue concerns the r8169 driver. Approximately one
> month ago was revealed an issue with this driver, causing kernel
> panics and possibly more if too large frames were sent to the chip
> (CVE-2009-1389). 2.4 was not affected by the bug, but showed the
> same symptoms. It turned out that there were multiple issues with
> the setting of RX descriptors after reuse, and some recent 2.6
> fixes allowing automatic recovery were missing. So after two long
> days trying to figure out why that damn chip insisted in writing
> more bytes than allowed (and crashing my box), I could spot and
> fix the issues.
>
> If there are 2.4 users with this cheap NIC, I strongly suggest that
> they upgrade, especially if they're used to encounter freezes or
> lack of network connectivity once in a while ; for others, well, do
> not buy that NIC.

The thing is that this very nic is used on-board on vast majority of
mainboards, at least in cheap- to mid-range price, for amd and intel
processors.  Also many notebooks use this chip series.  Several months
ago I were shopping for a mainboard with certain characteristics (I
needed 3 PCI ports and a way to plug some monitor, and support for 4
ECC DIMMs and recent Phenom processors) - it was difficult to find such
a combination alone, without additional constrains for !r8169 chip
(I finally bought Asus M3A-H/HDMI mobo with atl1 NIC, just by a chance).

/mjt
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