My thought exactly. I'm kinda curious as to what harm linux floffin off can do. Don't get me wrong, I still use and love Linux, but there is always a problem with linux, so far it's always in software/doesn't affect hardware, but I guess it's possible to do damage to the hardware?
Can't find the followup that explains the actual bug, but it had to do with the kernel unmapping some unneeded memory and ...blah... and whacking random garbage into the eeprom of the network card. All you had to do was boot linux once and your network card would never work again, at least until you went to the trouble of flashing it.
The post is titled "e1000e and the joy of development kernels"
This is hardly a matter of 'improper config'!
Why on EARTH are you running DEVELOPMENT KERNELS (not just talking about newish kernels) on your bare hardware? Is that something normal users would do? Why? How would they even acquire and install them?
How do you expect to ensure that bleeding edge open source development drivers cannot be used to do stupid things? Some kind of legal prohibition on making any drivers until you have been vetted by some central committee?
