From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040211 Firefox/0.8 Description of problem: A hard lock occurs when using the r8169 NIC module and high outbound traffic exists. No lock is observed with other NICs or when all traffic is inbound. Same behavior observed in kernel-2.6.4-1.298. A patch was recently applied to this module: http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2123 Perhaps this is the source of the problem? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.4-1.300 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Any process that triggers a high amount of outbound traffic will trigger the problem. For instance: 2. cd /usr/src/ 3. scp -r linux-2.6.4-1.300/ othermachine:/tmp Actual Results: Hard lock occurs shortly after the copying starts. Expected Results: Normal transfer of files. Additional info: From /var/log/messages: Mar 31 22:49:38 xx kernel: r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 1.2 loaded Mar 31 22:49:39 xx kernel: eth1: RealTek RTL8169 Gigabit Ethernet at 0x4284a800, 00:90:f5:27:01:e1, IRQ 217 Mar 31 22:49:39 xx kernel: eth1: Auto-negotiation Enabled. Mar 31 22:49:39 xx kernel: eth1: 100Mbps Full-duplex operation.
Further testing shows that the problem happens on the SMP kernels only. The single-processor kernels apparently are not affected by it.
Francois Romieu provided a patch that when applied to kernel-source-2.6.5-1.319 solves the problem. The link to this patch is: http://www.fr.zoreil.com/people/francois/misc/20040407-2.6.5-r8169.c-stable.patch
I too have a Realtek RTL-8169 and it bugs out every 2-4 days (Fedora Core 2, kernel 2.6.8-1.521). When it happens, I once saw the console flooded with the message: eth0: Too much work on interrupt The kernel appears to be locked up completely when this happens. Network traffic has not been very high. Should I open a new ticket for this?
I had this problem too on a Pentium 4 HT machine, running SMP kernels. I solved it by adding the noapic option to the kernel at boot time. Since I did this the problem stopped. I never experienced this bug when running UP kernels.
Please use the patch referred below to sync your kernel with a recent vanilla kernel. Amongst many things, napi could make a difference. If the symptoms do not disappear, consider opening a new ticket and Ccing me. Btw, assuming people are not hit by r8169 unrelated issues, the driver has already shown to be quite stable on real SMP systems. Patch available at: http://www.fr.zoreil.com/linux/kernel/2.6.x/2.6.8-1.521/r8169.c-2.6.8-1.521-to-2.6.9-rc2-dac.patch