[ILUG] Lock-up clue?

[Niall O Broin]

On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 09:48:34AM +0100, Brendan Halpin wrote:

> I've had three unexplained lockups in the last week or so --
> machine suddenly stops responding to everything, kbd, mouse,
> telnet, ping etc. The only way out was the reset switch. 
> 
> There was nothing in the logs either, except this snippet (the last
> item in /var/log/messages before the most recent lockup):
> 
> May 14 15:25:17 wivenhoe kernel: eth0: Too much work in interrupt, status e081.  Temporarily disabling functions (7f7e). 
> 
> Any clues what it might mean? I've never seen anything like it before.

This is a real stab in the dark, but if it's an Intel Etherpro NIC try
getting Intel's own driver. Kate put me on to this when some Compaq boxes
that I had set up for AnteFacto, which had that chipset, started
misbehaving. The NIC would essentially stop working for a while, and then
come back - dubious behaviour in a production mail server :-( I filed that
away mentally, and then I got a new notebook which had an integrated NIC
with an Intel chipset. Occasionally, when it booted, it was not accessible
across the net. It could usually be fixed by unloading and reloading the
NIC driver module, and by init 1/init 3, or by rebooting. Anyway, flaky
behaviour, which has been absent since I switched to Intel's own driver.

So, two different kinds of flaky behaviour, both fixed by changing to the
Intel supplied driver. If you have an Intel NIC, I'd definitely give that
driver a whirl. If not, what kernel version are you on ? A bump to the
latest version may help, given that you'll have the latest drivers.

Of course, we could be clutching at straws here, and the whole thing may be
related to some other flaky hardware problem altogether :-)



Regards,



Niall