A while back we had a very long thread about the queueing behavior of netdevices in a loss-of-carrier situation. This thread had the poetic subject: [patch 4/10] s390: network driver. The executive summary: Certain network drivers call netif_stop_queue() when they detect a loss of carrier. This has some unfortunate effects on the current networking stack, since packets are now being queued up at the qdisc level for an unbound period of time: *) the socket send buffer may be exhausted, preventing transmission to all devices (from this particular socket) *) resources are held "indefinitely": memory, socket/dst/module refcounts *) when carrier is re-established stale packets are sent out on the network, which could have undesirable effects The best solution seems to be to simply disable the queueing at the qdisc layer when this situation arises. That approach has been implemented in the patch below. Hasso Tepper reports succesfull testing of the patch with Quagga. Signed-off-by: Tommy S. Christensen