Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 112043
unregister_netdevice error preventing shutdown
Last modified: 2013-07-02 22:16:55 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Description of problem: When unplugging a PCMCIA network card (have tried a few different ones) the following error message appears on the console: kernel: unregister_netdevice: waiting for eth0 to become free. Usage count = 2 and is repeated every few seconds. This seems to prevent the machine being shut down so that removing the power is necessary. Also, the PCMCIA card will not work if re-inserted until machine has been rebooted. Have also tried a prism2 wireless card which uses the device wlan0. Same thing happens with eth0 replaced by wlan0 in the kernel message. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.21-4.0.1.EL How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Insert PCMCIA network card. Card works fine (IP address allocated via DHCP, IP packets flow). 2. Remove card, or shutdown/reboot machine. 3. Actual Results: At the point that the card is removed or card services shut down the above kernel messages begin to be logged. Shutdown/reboot never completes. Expected Results: Expect card to be removed without above message being logged and machine to shut down cleanly. Additional info:
A workaround seems to be to "ifconfig eth0 (or wlan0) down" before removing the card or shutting down the system. The module is successfully unloaded after doing this.
Are you using IPv6 also?
Hi Jeff - yes, I'm using IPv6.
What driver? What hardware?
This bug was fixed some time ago in one of the subsequent kernel releases.
We believe this was fixed in RHEL3 U2, which was advisory RHSA-2004:188.