Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 154206
Disabling DEBUG_PAGEALLOC cripples network
Last modified: 2015-01-04 17:18:41 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: Multiple symptoms of poor/erratic network performance and failure 1) Pinging default gateway - 25-50% packet loss, clusters of 4-5 RTT's in excess of 5sec. During periods of long RTT, top shows significant ksoftirqd CPU utilization. Eventually, no response from gateway at all (a few "destination unreachable" - or similar type responses from eth0's address). A "service network restart" brings it back again, but erratic ping performance is still there. No obvious errors logged. 2) Most websites load slowly if at all 3) Tools such as yum report multiple socket timeouts irrespective of destination. Download streams frequently pause for long periods if they work at all Re-enabling DEBUG_PAGEALLOC causes the network to behave normally Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.11-1.1225_FC4 and later How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot kernel-smp-2.6.11-1.1225_FC4 or later patched with vendor driver 2. 3. Actual Results: Network became effectively useless Expected Results: Network works Additional info: Motherboard is an Asus P5AD2-E Premium which comes with onboard Marvell PCIe 88E8053. The sk98lin driver shipped with the kernel does not work with this chip which it does not seem to recognize. The new skge driver currently being developed in net-dev doesn't work either, so it is necessary to use a vendor provided sk98lin driver (http://www.syskonnect.com/syskonnect/support/driver/zip/linux/install-8_15.tar.bz2) with a minor patch to make it use pci_name instead of slot_name
sounds like an issue you need to take up with the driver authors. This way it'll hopefully get fixed up before it hits Linus' tree (and subsequently Fedora).