One reason I love Linux is that when they’re a problem, it gets fixed. Usually, it gets fixed in a hurry and that’s exactly what happened with the e1000e Ethernet bug.

To bring you up to speed, a pre-release version of the 2.6.27 Linux kernel, which was being used in several beta Linux distributions, was sometimes frying the Ethernet firmware in systems equipped with the Intel ICH8 and ICH9 chipset and their 82566 and 82567 Ethernet chipsets. The major distributions to worry about were the Mandriva Linux 2009 pre-releases; Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Beta 1 and openSUSE 11 Beta 1; Fedora 10 release candidates 1 and 2; Gentoo Linux; and Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex.

OK, so most people were unlikely to ever see this bug, but, on the other hand, a lot of people play with beta Linux distributions. In particular, Fedora was very close to shipping so it’s reasonable to assume that quite a few Linux users were putting it through its paces.

Now, thanks to Intel, and a nudge from Linus Torvalds, there’s now code that will fix the problem. This fix will be in the next pre-release version of the 2.6.27 kernel — Linux 2.6.27-rc9 – on October 5th.

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