[Discuss] Linux on Lenovo P70 -- data corruption

[fdiprete at comcast.net (Frank DiPrete)]

What us the NIC in the laptop ?
I've had this problem before using the open source driver for a network
adapter.
(trying to remember which one)

-----Original Message-----
From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces+fdiprete=comcast.net at blu.org] On
Behalf Of Robert Krawitz
Sent: Monday, September 04, 2017 1:12 PM
To: discuss at blu.org
Subject: [Discuss] Linux on Lenovo P70 -- data corruption

I'm about at my wit's end here.

I bought a Lenovo P70 on eBay to run Linux on.  But I'm finding some data
corruption on network data transfers (e. g. scp, ftp, socat).
The oddity is that in the received files the bytes that are bad always have
011111 in the low 6 bits of their address.  There's some clustering, but not
tight clustering and not at regular intervals.

rsync sometimes reports protocol failures (in either direction -- from this
machine to something else or from another system to this).  The other system
is good.  scp/ssh don't report any such problems.

It appears that this is more severe under heavy traffic, and perhaps under
heavy load too.

Unfortunately, I'm not able (yet) to reproduce this under Windows using
either ftp or scp, with various background loads.  The addresses in suggest
that something's going wrong with writing the data out to disk (particularly
with scp, I'd expect errors to propagate with encryption or to get outright
protocol failures), but the protocol failures with rsync suggest that it's
somewhere else.

I get no problems with either memtest86 or Lenovo diags, and prime95 also
isn't reporting any issues.  This happens under both Knoppix
7.7.1 and openSUSE 42.3, the latter with any of the stock kernel, the
4.12.9+SUSE kernel, or the 4.12.9 vanilla kernel.

If I can reproduce the problem under Windows, the seller will refund me in
full and send it back to Lenovo.  If I can't, at best I'll have to pay a 15%
restocking fee on a not-inexpensive system.  If I try to send it to Lenovo
under warranty, I expect I'll get an NPF and just waste a lot of time and
yet another shipping fee.

The system has a Xeon E3-1505Mv5, nVidia M4000M (doesn't matter if X is
running or not), 32 GB RAM (yes, I've tried each of the two DIMMs
separately, in different slots), 4K display, two separate eSATA M.2 SSD's.
The BIOS is up to date with the hyperthreading fix, and in any event it
happens even if I turn hyperthreading off.  Right now it's an expensive
white elephant.

Any thoughts?
-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

***  MIT Engineers   A Proud Tradition   http://mitathletics.com  ***
Member of the League for Programming Freedom  --  http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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