[ENBD] 2.4.26a crashes

[Jerome Petazzoni]

> I've had two crashes like this in the last week. [...]
> [...] the machine locks. I can't login,
> although I can still ping the network interfaces and I can hit enter on
> the screeen and it scrolls.

that might mean a deadlock or a similar error condition inside the kernel.
when I was playing with ATM, I had the same problem on my SMP box : the
machine pings, the console echoes my keystrokes, but all processes are
completely screwed. If I try to telnet to an open port (which was
running a service before the crash), the TCP handshakes starts but does
not go to an end. In the ATM case, it was a mutual exclusion problem.
If you are running an SMP kernel, try running an UP kernel (recompile it,
so spinlocks and so on are completely disabled). else, the eepro100
driver might be buggy, but I suspect you would have seen other effects...
my wild, random guess : deadlock somewhere within enbd, perhaps when it
tries to "reschedule" an I/O operation to another channel ? but it's
just a very wild guess.

regards,
Jerome Petazzoni <skaya at enix dot org>
--
'They've given us the answers,' he [Carrot] said. 'Perhaps we can find out what
the questions should have been.'
(Feet of Clay)