Re: QUESTION: Network hangs with BP6 and 2.4.x kernels, hardware

Linus Torvalds
2001-01-12T20:05:34Z

In article <20010112200541.A25675@unternet.org>,
Frank de Lange <frank@unternet.org> wrote:
>As per Linus' suggestion, I removed the disable_irq/enable_irq statements from
>the 8390 core driver, and replace the spinlocks with irq-safe versions. This
>seems to solve the network hangs, as I am currently running a heavy network
>load (which would have killed a non-patched driver within seconds). Network
>latency seems a bit higher, and there are some hiccups in the streaming audio
>(part of the network load, easy indicator of performance...), but no hangs.

Ok, so it's tentatively the IOAPIC disable/enable code. But it could
obviously be something that just interacts with it, including just a
timing issue (ie the _real_ bug might just be bad behaviour when
changing IO-APIC state at the same time as an interrupt happens, and
disable/enable-irq just happen to be the only things that do it at a
high enough frequency that you can see the problem).

Remind me: what polarity are your io-apic irq's? Level, edge, sideways?
Anything else that might be relevant?

Linus