Hard lock with r8169 NIC module and SMP kernel.

[Alejandro Mota]

A hard lock occurs when using the r8169 (RealTek RTL8169 Gigabit
Ethernet) module and high outbound traffic exists. No lock is observed
with other NICs or when all traffic is inbound. This behavior is
observed in kernel-smp-2.6.4-1.298 and kernel-smp-2.6.4-1.300.

I also tested the uniprocessor kernel-2.6.4-1.300 on the same machine,
and the problem does not occur.

When using the SMP kernel, the system log shows:

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, xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, 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.

With the UP kernel:

Apr  2 02:09:23 xx kernel: r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver 1.2 loaded
Apr  2 02:09:23 xx kernel: eth1: RealTek RTL8169 Gigabit Ethernet at
0x42a40800, xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, IRQ 5
Apr  2 02:09:23 xx kernel: eth1: Auto-negotiation Enabled.
Apr  2 02:09:23 xx kernel: eth1: 100Mbps Full-duplex operation.



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?

Thanks.

--
Alejandro Mota