Yesterday while trying to do a big rsync (syncing portage on a Gentoo box), the process failed with strange errors and after a few retries I looked at dmesg. There were 10 oopses, so I logged them and rebooted the box. On reboot, it failed to unmount some NFS mounts, so a cold restart was needed.

Kernel is tainted (nvidia, vmware), but I guess it is not related to this (just a wild guess).

BTW dmesg was filled with the following:

Unknown EII protocol 86DD: csum at 16

which I guess has something to do with vmware and IPv6.

 # lspci
0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce CPU bridge (rev b2)
0000:00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 220/420 Memory Controller (rev b2)
0000:00:00.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 220/420 Memory Controller (rev b2)
0000:00:00.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 420 Memory Controller (DDR) (rev b2)
0000:00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce ISA Bridge (rev c3)
0000:00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation nForce PCI System Management (rev c1)
0000:00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce USB Controller (rev c3)
0000:00:03.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation nForce USB Controller (rev c3)
0000:00:04.0 Ethernet controller: nVidia Corporation nForce Ethernet Controller (rev c2)
0000:00:05.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation: Unknown device 01b0 (rev c2)
0000:00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation nForce Audio (rev c2)
0000:00:08.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce PCI-to-PCI bridge (rev c2)
0000:00:09.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation nForce IDE (rev c3)
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation nForce AGP to PCI Bridge (rev b2)
0000:01:00.0 Multimedia audio controller: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 07)
0000:01:00.1 Input device controller: Creative Labs SB Live! MIDI/Game Port (rev 07)
0000:01:02.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 41)
0000:01:02.1 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB (rev 41)
0000:01:02.2 USB Controller: NEC Corporation USB 2.0 (rev 02)
0000:01:03.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 02)
0000:02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NVCrush11 [GeForce2 MX Integrated Graphics] (rev b1)

 # cat /proc/ide/amd74xx 
----------AMD BusMastering IDE Configuration----------------
Driver Version:                     2.13
South Bridge:                       0000:00:09.0
Revision:                           IDE 0xc3
Highest DMA rate:                   UDMA100
BM-DMA base:                        0xe800
PCI clock:                          33.3MHz
-----------------------Primary IDE-------Secondary IDE------
Prefetch Buffer:              yes                 yes
Post Write Buffer:            yes                 yes
Enabled:                      yes                 yes
Simplex only:                  no                  no
Cable Type:                   80w                 40w
-------------------drive0----drive1----drive2----drive3-----
Transfer Mode:       UDMA       DMA      UDMA       PIO
Address Setup:       30ns      30ns      30ns      90ns
Cmd Active:          90ns      90ns      90ns      90ns
Cmd Recovery:        30ns      30ns      30ns      30ns
Data Active:         90ns      90ns      90ns     330ns
Data Recovery:       30ns      30ns      30ns     270ns
Cycle Time:          60ns     120ns      60ns     600ns
Transfer Rate:   33.3MB/s  16.6MB/s  33.3MB/s   3.3MB/s

 # cat /proc/ide/hd?/model 
Maxtor 98196H8
GENERIC CRD-BP1400P
Maxtor 54610H6

Any additional information and or debugging will be posted upon request.
Problem is not reproducible for now, will keep an eye.

Kalin.