Subject: Re: intermittant petabyte usage reported with broadcom nic

From: CaT <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:43:48 +1000

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 12:10:51PM -0700, Michael Chan wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-04-14 at 17:20 -0700, Michael Chan wrote:
> 
> > I also like Andi's idea of using change_page_attr() to isolate the
> > problem.  I'll try to send you a debug patch in the next few days to try
> > that out.  Thanks.
> 
> Here's the debug patch for x86 only that will change the statistics
> memory block to read-only.  If the kernel is corrupting it, you should
> get a page fault that will crash the system.  If you continue to see
> bogus counters, it is definitely a firmware or hardware problem.  Please
> try it and let me know.  Thanks.

Ahh. Would truly love to but the moment you said 'crash the system' I
had to bail. These boxes are in production and as such a crash would be,
shall we say, unwelcome. I might be able to fenagle something but I
very-much doubt it.

Perhaps Jean-Daniel, who is also experiencing this problem and seemingly
more frequently then I, has a box that he could run your patch on. I
think we both run pretty-much the same hardware (Dell [12]950s). I've
CCed him.

-- 
    "To the extent that we overreact, we proffer the terrorists the
    greatest tribute."
    	- High Court Judge Michael Kirby