On Thursday 19 July 2007 12:58, Ingo Molnar wrote: > i.e. it's the classic 'eth0 got stuck somehow' tx/rx state machine > hickup symptoms, with no other bad symptoms such as lockups or crashes.
Duh, I found it. The e1000 poll routine does this to leave polling mode. netif_rx_complete(poll_dev); e1000_irq_enable(adapter); return 0; Which looks innocent enough, except that e1000_irq_enable has this little irq_sem counter: if (likely(atomic_dec_and_test(&adapter->irq_sem))) { E1000_WRITE_REG(&adapter->hw, IMS, IMS_ENABLE_MASK); E1000_WRITE_FLUSH(&adapter->hw); } So as poll_napi calls the poll() routine repeatedly, the irq_sem counter is decremented by one each time. During the first call, it re-enables the interrupt. During the next calls, irq_sem goes negative. Then an interrupt comes in, e1000_intr disables the interrupt, increments irq_sem by one, and schedules the device for rx_action. rx_action calls dev->poll(), which finishes cleaning rx/rx rings, and when it finds there's no more work, it calls rx_complete and irq_enable. Except irq_enable doesn't enable anything now, since irq_sem is <= 0, and dec_and_test returns false. The whole irq_sem accounting in the e1000 does not rhyme well with netpoll's way of exercising dev->poll(). The reason my patch triggers the problem reliably for you is that now, we always get at least two invocations of dev->poll: once from poll_napi - where we do not remove the device from the poll list any longer - and another one from net_rx_action. I don't have a fix ready yet - I hope I'll have something later this afternoon. Olaf -- Olaf Kirch | --- o --- Nous sommes du soleil we love when we play [EMAIL PROTECTED] | / | \ sol.dhoop.naytheet.ah kin.ir.samse.qurax - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/