Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 142654
3c556B breaks 3c59x driver (gives MAC of "ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff") if ACPI enabled in kernel
Last modified: 2015-01-04 17:13:55 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.78 [en] (WinNT; U) Description of problem: ACPI appears to be broken on the 3c556B NIC. Reports elsewhere indicate other related 3Com cards may have ACPI problems. (This bug appears to be related to, but slightly different from the bugs reported as Bugzilla report 81422 and Bugzilla report 107389.) The primary indication of this specific problem is that the device's MAC address reports as all "FF"s. There are also numerous errors from the device logged in /var/log/messages... all indicating the device is not responding. The problem is corrected by turning off acpi in the kernel. Perhaps a better solution is the fix/kludge the 3c59x device driver (or kernel?) to automatically disable acpi whenever a device returns a MAC of all "FF"s and then try to reinitialize the device. Comments 88 & 89 on Bugzilla report 107389 provide additional details. It was recommended that I open a new bug report (thus, this report), since I had additional specific details regarding this problem and the problem I am reporting is somewhat different from the original 107389 problem. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.5-1.358 and kernel-2.6.9-1.6_FC2 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use IBM Thinkpad w/ 3Com 3c556B NIC and any ACPI enabled kernel past RH7.3 2. boot system 3. `ifconfig -a` should report MAC address of all "FF"s 4. edit grub.conf and add "acpi=off" (no quotes) to kernel line 5. reboot system 6. `ifconfig -a` should now report the correct MAC address and the interface should work correctly Additional info: There are A LOT of reports of problems with various 3Com laptop NICs -- both CardBus and PCMCIA. The acpi fix (which I found on a SuSE mailing list) would probably be a universal fix to most of these problems, and would probably fix all of the problems related to "all FFs" for a MAC address. Even if this bug is not fixed, there needs to be an easily located description of this problem that contains the acpi work-around until a fix is available. Locating a workable solution to this problem took about a day and a half of searching
http://www.fedorafaq.org/ Please talk to these folks to get this issue into their unofficial (but popular) FAQ. You may also want to use http://bugzilla.kernel.org/ and LKML to make sure upstream maintainers see this issue, as they probably do not read RH Bugzilla.
is this any better with the 2.6.10 based errata ?
Fedora Core 2 has now reached end of life, and no further updates will be provided by Red Hat. The Fedora legacy project will be producing further kernel updates for security problems only. If this bug has not been fixed in the latest Fedora Core 2 update kernel, please try to reproduce it under Fedora Core 3, and reopen if necessary, changing the product version accordingly. Thank you.