Comment 123 for bug 263555

A small Button with the phrase Don't Panic on it ...

http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/1/368

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=4a7703582836f55a1cbad0e2c1c6ebbee3f9b3a7

This patch is meant to prevent all future corruptions of the
e1000e NVM (non volatile memory) after the driver is loaded. The
registers stay locked until the machine is power cycled.

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> Does this impose any user-visible behavior change? (such as not being
> able to set up wake-on-lan, change MAC address, whatever).

no, because none of that is stored permanently in the eeprom unless you
do writes with ethtool -E. Our policy for the driver is generally don't
ever write to the eeprom. So all the normal paths (except for initial
start on preproduction hardware and ethtool -E writes) do not write to
the eeprom.

Currently the driver will let you try to commit a change but with this
patch it will never get written to NVM unless you reboot, load driver
(the first time!) with WriteProtectNVM=0 and *then* do ethtool -E.