forcedeth lockup in 2.6.21.5 and 2.6.22-rc6

["Mr. Berkley Shands" <bshands@exegy.com>]

With Centos-5.0/Redhat 5.0 on multiple motherboards (Tyan 2995/ 
SuperMicro H8DCE)
The forcedeth network driver locks up under heavy NFS traffic (32KB frames)
such as linking shared libraries. It either gives a register dump
on a lock up in the transmit side, or loops complaining about
eth0: too many iterations (6) in nv_nic_irq
The system is hung. I cannot get to /var/log/messages, and only dmesg gives
information. "service network restart" or even reloading the 
forcedeth.ko module
does not restore the link. The only fix is "reboot -f".

These machines are 4GB or 8GB opteron workstations. There is no problem
when using 2.6.20. The error counts reported by ifconfig usually show
framing errors, sometimes > 10 digits worth concurrent with this issue
(after being up 5 minutes). I can reproduce this 100% of the time with
2.6.21.5 and 2.6.22-rc6.

Any clues on what to try next?

berkley

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// E. F. Berkley Shands, MSc//

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