Possible Hardware Damaging Bug

Linux 2.6.27 has a serious bug where it can permanently disable your e1000 ethernet device by damaging the firmware stored on the device. Linux 2.6.27 has recently been included in the Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) alphas. Testing the Ubuntu 8.10 alphas on your e1000 hardware is potentially very dangerous.

If you’re unsure whether you have an e1000 card, and if you’re running a previous Intrepid alpha, or if you’d like to try it out, it might be best to check first. You can check whether you have an e1000 network card with the “lspci” command in a terminal, which will show you a list of PCI connected hardware. You can also check whether you have the e1000 module currently loaded by typing “lspci  | grep e1000″. If your’e still unsure, please ask a friend to help you check.

Bug report in Launchpad

The Ubuntu bug report on this matter states:

In some circumstances it appears possible for the 2.6.27-rc kernels to corrupt the NVRAM used by some Intel network parts to store data such as MAC addresses. This is limited to the new e1000e driver, and reports have only appeared from users of “82566 and 82567 based LAN parts (ich8 and ich9)” (to quote Intel). The reports seem to be isolated to laptops, but it is not clear if this is because desktop/server parts are not vulnerable, or if use cases simply increase the chances of laptop users being hit.

It’s not clear whether users of older e1000 cards are affected, but on-board ethernet devices typically aren’t easy to replace, so I suggest you play it safe until there is more clarity on the issue.

Developer announcement

An announcement has been made on the ubuntu-devel-announce list, which states that users who do testing should be informed of this problem:

While we expect alphas to include a fair number of bugs, and rely on your continued support and testing to help resolve these bugs for Ubuntu releases, bugs that damage hardware are quite another matter.  As a result of this bug we must recommend that users do *not* use Intrepid alphas, including the LiveCDs, on machines with Intel GigE ethernet.

Please tell your friends who use Intel Gigabit network cards to be careful, and not use Intrepid Alphas or Betas until this issue has been known to be resolved.

In The Meantime

Testing of the Ubuntu 8.10 pre-release versions is still strongly necessery and encouraged. If you are affected by this bug, you can test Ubuntu in a virtualised environment in the meantime using either of the following (linking to instructions):

• VirtualBox
• KVM
• VMWare
• Xen

If you’re looking for the quickest and easiest option, I recommend VirtualBox.

Update:

The e1000e module will be removed from the module-init-tools package, preventing it from being loaded. This is hopefully a temporary solution, according to Tim Gardner:

Pursuant to discussions on this list, ongoing discussions in the bug
report (Bug #263555), and IRC chats with our release manager Steve
Langasek I've uploaded module-init-tools_3.3-pre11-4ubuntu10 to Intrepid
with a blacklist file for e1000e. Hopefully this is a temporary measure.

When the updated module-init-tools makes it into the archive, the daily builds should be completely safe to use on your computer with an e1000 card. The downside is that your ethernet card won’t work. On desktop machines, it’s usual to have a spare PCI slot and quite easy to add another cheap ethernet card. On servers it’s not always the case, and on laptops it’s certainly not, so don’t take any big chances. I’m hoping badly that this is just a temporary solution. The release date is already starting to loom, and the beta is imminent. Shipping an Ubuntu version where ethernet adaptors don’t work will not be cool.

The Mother

My mother have been using Ubuntu on her desktop PC since just after Ubuntu 7.04 has been released. My mother doesn’t do much on her PC, she manages photos, browses the web, reads e-mail, keeps in touch with Pidgin and plays the occasional game. About 3 months ago, she bought a new laptop with Vista. I thought she’d get along with it fine, and with me being so far away from home so much these days, I thought she’d be fine. Well, she wasn’t. In fact, the laptop has been lying in a cupboard because she just couldn’t get things to work on it. She’s been visiting over the weekend, so I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on it, and she’s very happy with it. She’s been telling everyone how nicely her laptop is working now since I’ve “upgraded” it

I did a Google search to find what people install on their mother’s machines, but couldn’t find anything really helpful. These are the packages I installed on my mother’s laptop:

• thunderbird
• gnome-ppp
• some games from universe

I then just added some bookmarks to Firefox for the sites she often visits, configured Pidgin and Thunderbird, added a photo to her session info and imported all her music into Rhythmbox. So far everything is working very nicely.

The Server

These are packages I usually install on servers. Not all of these packages usually gets installed on all servers though. These are just a few favourites.

• screen
• mc
• htop
• debmirror
• irssi
• debootstrap
• vim
• toilet
• figlet
• openssh-server
• ethstatus
• ddclient
• apache2
• nmap
• rkhunter
• postfix
• traceroute
• links2
• sshfs
• strace
• gpw
• ccze

The Desktop

At least, my desktop, plus the packages on the server list.

• wireshark
• thunderbird
• network-manager-openvpn
• quanta
• agave
• build-essential
• k3b
• nautilus-open-terminal
• fakeroot
• freemind
• debhelper
• devscripts
• strace
• liferea
• vlc
• virtualbox

If there’s something else I should install by default and don’t know about, please leave a comment

The Wine project has announced the first release candidate for Wine, the free Windows API for Unix/Unix-like systems (and even non-unix systems like MS Windows itself and ReactOS). The Wine project started in 1993, which makes this release candidate 15 years in the making.

With so many excellent software for Linux systems these days, and the combination of powerful desktop hardware with great free virtualisation suites such as Virtualbox, people often ask me what the actual benefit of having a complete and stable free Windows API is. The ones I could think of is:

• Gaining the benefits of free software. This comes down to having the ability to fix bugs yourself, or getting someone else to fix them for you. A company might have to run some legacy software under Windows, and Microsoft itself might not find it financially beneficial to fix a certain bug in their system. You could then switch to a free API and if the bug is present there as well, have it fixed. Since Wine does not run Windows under an emulator (or run Microsoft Windows at all), you do not need a Windows license, which you would need if you would run Windows under KVM/Virtualbox/VMWare/etc.

• Beneficial to ReactOS (and similar projects). ReactOS is an attempt to completely re-write the entire Windows operating system, including boot loader, registry. kernel and user interface. ReactOS uses Wine for its Windows API. ReactOS is currently in early alpha state, and plans to release an alpha that is roughly 70% of a Windows NT 5 (Windows XP) kernel by the end of 2008.

• Allows software vendors to dip their toes into cross-platform support. Software vendors such as Google have ported software such as Picassa and GoogleEarth to Linux-based systems using Winelib. Using Winelib, a software vendor can package their software to run on non-Windows systems at a fraction of the cost of what a rewrite or proper port would cost. While this may be a short-term solution for some providers, it may give them a market lead boost by being able to provide to a large audience rather sooner than later.

• Commercial Wine support providers such as Crossover or Transgaming (see Tom’s comment below). These companies patch Wine to provide additional support for certain software and also provide user interfaces to allow easy installation and configuration of Windows software. The software released by these type of companies are usually proprietary software.

• Performance and integration. Even though desktop hardware has become cheaper, and virtualisation software offers more and more nice features such as ’seamless’ window mode, running a complete additional operating system does come at a performance hit. At the very least, it will typically consume a dedicated amount of memory. Unless you do fancy tricks with shared directories between the host and guest systems, you also don’t get tight desktop integration with the software running in the guest. Running your legacy software under Wine allows you to get past some of these problems.

That’s the immediate benefits I could think of from having a free, stable Windows API available. There are probably more, and while I think that we probably won’t care about this anymore 10-15 years from now, considering all the next-generation cross-platform programming tools that are available now, I do think that the coming of age of the Wine project will be welcomed by many, and will provide many companies and individuals plenty of short-term benefits while the computing landscape transforms.

From Tectonic, I read that Sun Microsystems is in the process of acquiring Innotek, makers of Virtualbox. Virtualbox is a relatively new free virtualisation suite that compares well to many of the proprietary virtualisation suites. This comes just a month after they bought MySQL for a cool US$1bn. Virtualbox is also packaged for Ubuntu, you can get it by installing the virtualbox-ose package.

Is it just me? Or are companies now acquiring other companies at a much larger rate than usual? It seems that the landscape of the free software and the proprietary software industries are getting quite shaked up by these acquisitions. Motorola may be selling their cellphone division soon, and Google is working hard on the Android platform, I’ve been speculating internally whether Google would buy them out (or even whether they’ll have enough money to do so). Google’s focus is on the software side, but I think it would give them a healthy boost to acquire a big market share out of the box. Then again, that’s a bit off-topic for this post, I think 2008 will prove to be an interesting year for the information industry with all these acquisitions that have taken place, and those still looming.