[geeks] WARNING: Latest Solaris 10 x86 patches and Broadcom

[Shannon Hendrix]

[ Posted to geeks due to recent relevant discussion ]

A heads up on kernel panics caused by new kernel patches, the Broadcom  
driver.

I just finished patching my Solaris 10 U6 system, a Dell T105.

When I rebooted, it kernel panicked.

I booted again in the kernel debugger and traced the problem to the  
Broadcom NetXtreme driver.

Disabling the Broadcom ethernet port in BIOS fixed the problem.  In my  
case this is fine because I use an Intel gigabit PCIe adapter, and  
don't need the built-in port.

As far as I know, the driver from Broadcom is fine, it seems that one  
of Sun's kernel patches caused the panic.

I don't yet know if simply re-installing the driver from Broadcom will  
work or not.

The stack trace showed a few levels of nvidia calls, which made me  
think it was the new SATA driver, but from what I've read those are  
just chipset support for the Broadcom.
	
Therefore, I don't really know if this only happens on nVidia systems  
with Broadcom NetXtreme, or any similar hardware.

Of course, I also don't know precisely which of the new patches caused  
the problem, but it seems likely it was one of 3-4 kernel patches  
which contain a cluster of minor driver patches.



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