On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 08:54:25PM -0400 or thereabouts, Ananda Bhattacharya wrote:
> I have read Vincent Touquet  about the Tyan motherboard and 
> the 3ware problems that cause a lockup. He believes that 
> this is due to dma causing the PCI bus to overload and then 
> the system crashes. I am running a similar system with 
> a National Semiconducotrs GigaBit Card and then there is a 
> 3-ware card with 12 disks on it. I believe to fix this 
> problem is to use dma=off as a boot option. Does anyone have 
> another idea, or an exact idea why lockups like this happen?
> I have not as of yet used the dma=off option myself. 
> thank you 

I run at least 12+ machines with a similar configuration(Tyan S2466
dual athon w/3ware controllers). And I have been testing heavy loads
with them for over a year and not seen anything related to what you describe.
But, I do not use NatSemi network cards, mostly Broadcom Gbit
cards(tg3 driver) and some intel e1000 Gbit cards.  Maybe the problem is
your network card ?