+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #180063 +++ (Borrowed from Charles Lopes description, but adjusted for my similar hardware) After a certain period of time that can go from a couple of hours to a couple of days, the device stops receiving and sending packets. There's no oops or any other kernel message generated. tcpdump of the interface still show local packets going to this interface, but "ip -s link" show no change in RX or TX. The only way I have found to restore network connectivity is to unload and reload the kernel module. The network device is built-in an Asus A8V Deluxe motherboard. "lspci" gives this information: 00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 13) Problem happens when using both cores of the Athlon64X2 processor. Rawhide uses skge, FC4 uses sk98lin, and both present the same problem. Booting with maxcpus=1 appears to work around it, but it's a shame to not be able to use the second core :-(
Have you tried using the fedora-netdev kernels? http://people.redhat.com/linville/kernels/fedora-netdev/ Please do so, and post the results here...thanks!
I don't see fedora-netdev kernels for FC5 or devel. Are your FC4 kernel builds supposed to work on FC5T3 as well, or should I go back to FC4 for proper testing?
The FC4 kernels probably work on FC5 userland, but you may have to install the RPMs manually.
It does work in general, but it appears to still fail in the same way. In fact, it seems to have got even worse; in some, better. For some time I couldn't ping the box at all. When I got back in front of it, to restart the network card, I found out the disk subsystem was also dead (as per bug 181310) and, for the first time, the screen saver had blocked access to the system (probably because I had an ongoing build and the screen saver code had to be paged in to unlock). I managed to switch to VT1, verify that the disk subsystem was dead and then use Alt-SysRq to try to get some info. I couldn't collect any useful info, but after killing all processes and remounting filesystems read-only, I tried to ping the box again from an external host and that worked, so somehow networking seems to have recovered. I can't tell whether that was because of my Alt-SysRq interactions or because of the elapsed time, unfortunately. I'll give that kernel a try again later and try to determine whether I ever manage to trigger the networking error without an associated disk error. Nothing useful in /var/log/messages; it had been dead for hours, so maybe the disk subsystem died before the network. Too bad I couldn't even log in to figure out what was going on :-(
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 182618 ***