[maemo-developers] Data corruption on N770

[From: Frantisek Dufka]

Neil MacLeod wrote:

> Until this bug is eliminated any device instability while WiFi is enabled can be attributed to it.
> 

Well it is slightly worse. Also some device instability even when wifi 
is off can be attributed to it if wi-fi was enabled at least once on 
this device. Like this example shows, it most probably corrupted memory 
of application manager before it saved updated status file with package 
info. Any file modified when wi-fi is on can become corrupted. One 
random example - whole gconf system configuration is saved as a set of 
xml files and contain sensitive data that could bring device to reboot 
loop or random reboot when some (system) application reads its settings 
from it and becomes confused due to bad data. This configuration is 
saved when some device setting changes (like changing brightness or 
sound volume level) which happens relatively often. Also installation of 
any package over network can corrupt some random bytes when extracting 
it so future execution can run faulty code or read bad data even when 
wi-fi is not enabled.

Yes, it would be nice to have it fixed in latest downloadable 2006 
firmware or at least in some re-release of current 2007 based hacker 
edition version before it moves to 2008. And it is worth fixing even if 
we lived with this bug in our tablets for 2 years and were mostly happy :-)

Frantisek