Gigabit ethernet RTL8169 problems with kernel 2.6.10-1.760?

[Deron Meranda]

After updating to the latest kernel, 2.6.10-1.760_FC3, I rebooted
(without cycling the power) and something strange happened.

My gigabit ethernet card (RTL8169 chipset on PCI card) simply
did not work at all.  The TCP stack seemed fine, but no Ethernet
frames would ever go out.  No arp resolutions would even happen,
nor anything else.  No amount of bringing down or up the interface
(eth0) worked, nor bringing up or down the link (ip link set ...).

I noticed that the activity lights on my gigabit switch for that
port were continuously busy; but no traffic was entering any
other ports.  I examined the syslog and nothing out of place
was found, except the expected things like NFS mounts failing.


I finally powered the system completely off then on, and it has
been behaving correctly ever since.  No network cables were
touched nor was the switch reset.  Thus, this is no longer an
immediate problem for me.  But I wanted to report this in case
there is some kind of linux problem and not just a freak occurrence.

Has anybody else seen something like this?
-- 
Deron Meranda