Re: 2.6.22.1: hang with forcedeth driver?

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Thu, 2 Aug 2007 11:57:21 +0300 (EEST)
Timo Jantunen <jeti@welho.com> wrote:

> Heip!
> 
> I have had few total hangs with 2.6.22.1 kernel. Everything suddenly 
> freezes and nothing works (SysRq keys, pinging the machine from the 
> network.) Neither syslog nor netconsole have any relevant messages. I'm 99% 
> sure this didn't happen in 2.6.21.x kernels.

Try enabling the NMI watchdog?  (boot with nmi_watchdog=1 on the kernel
command line) (or maybe nmi_watchdog=2).

otoh, I think NMI watchdog is always enabled on x86_64.  But the counts
aren't going up.  I forget what the story is there, apart from
lets-be-as-different-from-i386-as-we-can :(

> All hangs happened with relatively high network traffic (twice with mplayer 
> using remote display, once with high network fs activity). I copied 
> gigabytes of files over nfs but couldn't dupicatate the problem that way, 
> but OTOH I have also watched hours of video without problems so the problem 
> doesn't occur often. (In the mplayer case, the file I play is usually on 
> remote nfs disk, too.)
> 
> I started using mplayer from a text console and today I finally managed to 
> catch first bit of information. The machine hanged like before (even SysRq 
> keys don't print anything) but there was one console message:
> 
> eth0: too many iterations (6) in nv_nic_irq.
> 
> Looking at the sources, it seems when too much works happens in a single 
> interrupt, the driver tries to disable device interrupts (and prints above 
> message). It doesn't seem to be expecting the machine to hang afterwards.
> 
> I guess the quick fix for me is to increase max_interrupt_work value so it 
> doesn't get hit as easily.
> 

Well.  A Key piece of information would be: did that help?

> 
> I have nForce3 board and Athlon 64 X2 CPU (but using 32-bit kernel). I'm 
> using the built in ethernet with forcedeth driver. I also have ATI/AMD 
> binary drivers loaded, and at least in some of the cases, VMware host 
> drivers, too.
>