Comment 31 for bug 839393

Thanks Leann and hackurx.

I'm trying to use Ubuntu 11.10 on a fit-pc2i with Realtek hardware (RTL8111/8168B according to lspci), with vlan tagging enabled via virtual interfaces, and was seeing an easily reproducible kernel freeze. The signature of the problem is: if I run "tail -f /var/log/kern.log" I'd see multiple "eth1: link up" messages (with no intervening "link down"), followed shortly thereafter by the box becoming completely unresponsive.

It's easy to find complaints about r8169 problems all over the Internet and mostly they say to use r8168 instead; I tried that and I couldn't get it to work with vlan tagging whatsoever.

Then I tried the r8169 driver from Leann's ppa. I can still trigger the problem with the same repro steps, but now the kernel doesn't freeze. I do see the multiple "link up" messages, and one time I got warning backtrace from warn_slowpath_common in net/core/dev.c, but no freezing is a big improvement.