Network outage with FC6 and sky2 driver

Brian brian at miatar.org
Fri May 18 15:11:14 UTC 2007


I'm a Linux novice and need a helping hand.

I have an AMD64-3200, Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard with 1Gb RAM and 4x320Gb
Western Digital IDEs as RAID 5 on a 3ware 7506-4 controller. This is my home
file server, Internet router and firewall. The motherboard has two Gb
ethernet interfaces, an nVidia CK804 controller (forcedeth driver) and a
Marvell 88E8053 PCI-E controller (sky2 driver). I'm using the nVidia
controller for the WAN side and the Marvell interface for the LAN side. It
is completely up to date via yum and I don't have any additional
repositories configured. Kernel is 2.6.20-1.2948.fc6 #1 SMP.

I'm using rsync over ssh to backup a large amount of data(400Gb) to another
FC6 host located on the LAN. The target host is running the same kernel
version but it's i386. I'm using a cheap Netgear Gigabit switch, model
GS108. After 40-50Gb is transferred, the AMD-64-3200 system's network
completely drops and a reboot seems to be the only way to restore. Bringing
the interface up/down or restarting networking entirely does not restore
connectivity. I haven't tried reloading the modules yet. iptables is
disabled. Network connectivity for all the other hosts on the LAN is just
fine. 

There are no useful messages in /var/log/messages when this happens. 

I've heard of trouble with the sky2 driver specifically "card locking up
under heavy transmit load". Is this still a problem? or do I have something
else going on? Someone suggested the kernel option CONFIG_PROFILING hoses
the sky2 driver. Is this true? If so, is option enabled in the FC6 kernel?
How can I tell?

I really need both interfaces fully functioning as I don't have any
additional slots left in this box. It will eventually run MythTV with a
PVR-350 and Audigy sound card filling all the available slots. 

I've just switched interfaces (nVidia for LAN) and we'll see if this
repeats. If not, I'll single out the sky2 driver and look into trying to
remove the CONFIG_PROFILING option in a custom kernel. 

Any other ideas? How can I further troubleshoot the dead interface? 


Thanks in advance,
-Brian 





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