[gentoo-amd64] Re: Anybody having trouble with the via-velocity driver on 2.6.29?

[Duncan]

Kyle Liddell <kyle@××××××××××××××××.net> posted
20090401060645.GA4182@athlon, excerpted below, on  Wed, 01 Apr 2009
02:06:45 -0400:

> After upgrading the kernel from 2.6.28-gentoo-r3 to 2.6.29, I'm having a
> weird problem: If I make "light" use of the network (ssh, email, http,
> etc), no trouble.  But, if I make "heavy" use of the network (say,
> copying a few GB from a local NFS server to /dev/null), the network
> interface stops working almost immediately.  ifconfig, mii-tool, the
> NIC's led, and the switch's LED all say that the link is still up.  But,
> all my connections time out, ping gets no replies, etc. (I'm using the
> via-velocity driver for my motherboard's built-in 1GB NIC.)

I'm unsure if your hardware is affected, but there's a known NAPI and 
interrupt related regression in 2.6.29.  It was due to a commit trying to 
fix another bug just a few hours before release, and the discovery and 
subsequent bug trace was one of two subthreads quickly attached to Linus' 
2.6.29 official announcement.  (FWIW, the other subthread was even more 
fallout from the earlier ext4 data loss over improper shutdown, where 
ext3 was fine.  That has and continues to generate HUGE subthreads all 
over the place, from the Ubuntu bug filing that was one of the first 
reports of it to LKML to /. to LWN.  ext4 may have had the dev- removed 
from the name, but it's not exactly stable as this demonstrates, and 
what's worse, many people including Ted Tso seem to think the problem 
really is NOTABUG.)

Assuming your NIC hardware is indeed affected as it looks to be, if 
there's nothing in 2.6.29 that you are really needing, consider reverting 
to the 2.6.28.x stable series until at least 2.6.29.1 (and check its 
changelog but it should be there).  If you do need something in 2.6.29, 
consider using the git snapshot from a day or two pre-release or go find 
the thread on LKML and see if there's yet a good patch. (They were still 
testing patches when I happened across the thread in my browsing, with 
several proposals not quite fixing it, and it's significantly more 
complicated than a simple revert of the problem commit, as other 2.6.29 
changes triggered IRQ processing issues that weren't there in the 
2.6.28.x stable series.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman