Comment 99 for bug 661294

There are a few reasons this bug report is not well looked after. Admitted not all very good ones but things come together. First of all this seems quite hardware specific (not only tied to the NIC but possibly also to other sources like mother board make, the network cables or switches). I myself have a Realtek 8111/8168B and could never reproduce the issue.
There is also the time. There are always other and more problem which may affect even more people. And as long as there is no one asking in the report about its status, it unfortunately can fall down the cracks. I probably should have unassigned myself but then I had forgotten about it.
There is also the problem that over time there have been additions to this report that are about completely different hardware (Intel NICs instead of Realtek). This unfortunately causes often more confusion than it is helpful. Just as a general rule, for something that looks hardware specific it is better to open its own bug. It is easy to make it a duplicate of some other bug for someone looking at them but it is really hard to work on one report that mixes comments of things that are actually not the same.
Just a word about the driver from Realtek: it is a valid option for someone affected but to have that bundled up in the distro kernel just is too much of a burden for maintenance. Someone needs to make sure that it does not break when the rest of the kernel changes, there would be different bugs than for the in-kernel driver and so on. And Realtek should really make sure the driver in the upstream kernel is good. That would help everyone.

But ok, so much for attempts of explanations from this side. What I would like to propose is that those who are still affected by this on either Precise (12.04) or Quantal (development release as of now) should open their own new bug report ("ubuntu-bug linux" will gather automatically some data which is usually asked for). Optionally reporting the bug number here, so people with the same hw can subscribe to the new report. This just to get things separated. There always was one other problem. Without any oops or panic message and the system only locking up it is near impossible to find anything. Being logged in or using netconsole is of little use when the NIC is the problem. Serial ports are quite rare now (maybe a usb-serial adapter could be used). So I was wondering about using crashdump when I saw newer posts on this report. Unfortunately this is in a bit of a broken state as I found out when looking. I plan to update the debugging wiki (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/CrashdumpRecipe) as one of the next things to do. So when that is updated it may be an option to get some useful data for finding the issue.