Comment 23 for bug 83009

Tim, thank you for your work. Sadly, like Darren, I too encountered soft-lockups with that sky2.ko.2.6.20-14 (as with a complete vanilla 2.6.21-rc6 kernel). It's slightly better with this version. Removing the module and reloading it again makes the network work again. With earlier versions of the driver I often had to reboot because nearly everything segfaulted after a soft-lockup (unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address xxxxxxxx).

Also I tested Marvell's non-free open-source upstream driver for several days and stressed it with downloading several Linux distro images while keeping the CPU high with compile jobs and folding@home. No softlockups, no nothing. That driver seems to be stable. If anyone wants to install it (download link in a comment above): the first line of the install.sh script needs to be changed from
#!/bin/sh
to
#!/bin/bash
to make it work. Further you need the kernel-header package installed for your kernel, i.e. linux-headers-2.6.20-14-generic and set a link from /usr/src/linux to these headers, for example
$ sudo ln -s /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.20-14-generic /usr/src/linux
After that, the install.sh script should work fine. Choose the option 1 for 'installation', it will afterwards give the options to either remove or disable (it renames it) the existing sky2 driver, both options should work.