I'm encountering strange networking problems when using linux 2.6.31-gentoo-r3: after a certain time (say, a couple of hours) connection to the internet becomes more and more unreliable - for example, www.google.com will have a timeout (on the other hand, other websites are doing just fine). Yesterday evening (while upgrading) I was unable to connect to any ftp server. Other machines on my local network (a FreeBSD one and a Mac IBook) have no problems at all. After rebooting, the network problems just vanish. I'd be happy to further debug this problem if someone could give me a hint how :-/ Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use the internet for a couple of hours 2. Timeouts (esp. ftp) 3.
I have seen problems with that chipset in the past. Pronounced "force-death", as in death to your network :{ Have you had any older kernels that worked well with it though? Or is this a new system, so 2.6.31-gentoo-r3 is the only one you've tried so far.
(In reply to comment #1) > Have you had any older kernels that worked well with it though? Or is this a > new system, so 2.6.31-gentoo-r3 is the only one you've tried so far. Actually, there's another think to consider - I've replaced my venerable Netgear RT314 with a TP-Link router (because of wlan). The combination forcedeth/kernel/tp-link router seems to cause problems - the router itself isn't the cause - rebooting it doesn't solve the problems at all, only rebooting the machine. Forcedeth in combination with RT314 did work well for about 8 month (including 2.6.29/30 kernels). This is very hard to debug, though: After a couple of hours the network connectivity gets more and more unstable - strangely enough, only to certain hosts (like google, youtube, a lot of ftp hosts used in emerge -u), bing or wikipedia are completely unaffected. It's like there's suddenly a firewall between the machine and the target hosts. Some connections may get through, though... Plus: yesterday the connection to google (as an example) suddenly became clear again. The symptoms stated above look like a router problem (like the NAT table getting clogged), but - as also stated above - resetting the router has no effect at all, only rebooting the machine - and that's a clue that there's some kernel/forcedeth problem. I'd be really happy to debug this, but right now I haven't got any clue how - tcpdump doesn't show anything unusual, neither does ethtool :-/
Please add your emerge --info.
(In reply to comment #3) > Please add your emerge --info. Very well: spectre ~ # emerge --info Portage 2.2_rc46 (default/linux/amd64/10.0, gcc-4.4.2, glibc-2.10.1-r0, 2.6.31-gentoo-r3 x86_64) ================================================================= System uname: Linux-2.6.31-gentoo-r3-x86_64-AMD_Phenom-tm-_9950_Quad-Core_Processor-with-gentoo-2.0.1 Timestamp of tree: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:15:01 +0000 ccache version 2.4 [enabled] app-shells/bash: 4.0_p35 dev-java/java-config: 2.1.9-r1 dev-lang/python: 2.6.3, 3.1.1-r1 dev-util/ccache: 2.4-r8 dev-util/cmake: 2.6.4-r3 sys-apps/baselayout: 2.0.1 sys-apps/openrc: 0.5.2-r1 sys-apps/sandbox: 2.1 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.63-r1 sys-devel/automake: 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r2, 1.10.2, 1.11 sys-devel/binutils: 2.20 sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.4.1 sys-devel/libtool: 2.2.6a virtual/os-headers: 2.6.30-r1 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="amd64 ~amd64" CBUILD="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-march=amdfam10 -O2 -pipe" CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/share/X11/xkb /usr/share/config /var/lib/hsqldb" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/ca-certificates.conf /etc/env.d /etc/env.d/java/ /etc/eselect/postgresql /etc/fonts/fonts.conf /etc/gconf /etc/gentoo-release /etc/php/apache2-php5/ext-active/ /etc/php/cgi-php5/ext-active/ /etc/php/cli-php5/ext-active/ /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/sandbox.d /etc/terminfo /etc/texmf/language.dat.d /etc/texmf/language.def.d /etc/texmf/updmap.d /etc/texmf/web2c /etc/udev/rules.d" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="assume-digests ccache distlocks fixpackages news parallel-fetch preserve-libs protect-owned sandbox sfperms strict unmerge-logs unmerge-orphans userfetch" GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://ftp.tu-clausthal.de/pub/linux/gentoo/ ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/Linux/gentoo http://linux.rz.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/download/gentoo-mirror/ ftp://linux.rz.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/gentoo-mirror/ http://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/mirrors/gentoo ftp://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/mirrors/gentoo ftp://ftp.join.uni-muenster.de/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo ftp://ftp.wh2.tu-dresden.de/pub/mirrors/gentoo ftp://ftp.join.uni-muenster.de/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo http://mirrors.sec.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/gentoo/ http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/gentoo/ ftp://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/gentoo/ http://gentoo.mneisen.org/ http://de-mirror.org/distro/gentoo/ ftp://de-mirror.org/distro/gentoo/ http://ftp.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de/mirrors/gentoo/ ftp://ftp.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de/mirrors/gentoo/ http://mirror.jamit.de/gentoo/ http://mirror.netcologne.de/gentoo/ ftp://mirror.netcologne.de/gentoo/ " LANG="de_DE.utf8" LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1" LINGUAS="de" MAKEOPTS="-j5" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT="/" PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --compress --force --whole-file --delete --stats --timeout=180 --exclude=/distfiles --exclude=/local --exclude=/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.europe.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="3dnow X a52 aac aalib acl acpi aim alsa amd64 apache2 aspell audiofile bash-completion bcmath bluetooth branding bzip2 cairo calendar cddb cdparanoia cdr cli consolekit cracklib crypt cscope css ctype cups curl cxx dbus derby djvu dri dts dv dvb dvd dvdr dvdread encode enscript exif expat fam ffmpeg fftw firefox flac fontconfig foomaticdb fortran ftp gd gdbm geoip gif gimp glib glut gmp gnuplot gnutls gpg gphoto2 gpm gps graphviz gsl gtk gzip hal hddtemp htmlhandbook iconv icq icu idn imagemagick imap imlib innodb isdnlog jabber java java6 javascript jbig jingle jpeg jpeg2k kde kontact kpathsea lame lash latex lcms ldap libcaca libnotify libsamplerate libwww lm_sensors lua lzo mad maildir mailwrapper matroska mhash mime mmap mmx mng modplug modules mp2 mp3 mp4 mpeg mpi mplayer msn mudflap multilib musepack musicbrainz mysql mysqli ncurses netcdf nls nntp nptl nptlonly nsplugin nvram offensive ofx ogg openal openexr opengl openmp oscar pam pcntl pcre pda pdf perl php plasma png policykit posix postgres ppds pppd python qt3 qt3support qt4 quicktime raw rdesktop readline recode reflection rss samba sasl sdl semantic-desktop session sharedext sharedmem shorten slang smp sndfile snmp soap sockets sox speex spell spl sql sse sse2 ssl startup-notification subversion suid svg sysfs syslog sysvipc szip taglib tcpd theora threads tidy tiff timidity tokenizer truetype unicode usb v4l2 vcd vdr videos vim-syntax vnc vorbis wavpack webdav webkit wlm wmf x264 xattr xface xft xine xml xorg xpm xscreensaver xsl xulrunner xv xvid xvmc yahoo yaz zlib" ALSA_CARDS="ali5451 als4000 atiixp atiixp-modem bt87x ca0106 cmipci emu10k1x ens1370 ens1371 es1938 es1968 fm801 hda-intel intel8x0 intel8x0m maestro3 trident usb-audio via82xx via82xx-modem ymfpci" ALSA_PCM_PLUGINS="adpcm alaw asym copy dmix dshare dsnoop empty extplug file hooks iec958 ioplug ladspa lfloat linear meter mmap_emul mulaw multi null plug rate route share shm softvol" APACHE2_MODULES="actions alias auth_basic authn_alias authn_anon authn_dbm authn_default authn_file authz_dbm authz_default authz_groupfile authz_host authz_owner authz_user autoindex cache dav dav_fs dav_lock deflate dir disk_cache env expires ext_filter file_cache filter headers include info log_config logio mem_cache mime mime_magic negotiation rewrite setenvif speling status unique_id userdir usertrack vhost_alias" ELIBC="glibc" INPUT_DEVICES="keyboard mouse evdev" KERNEL="linux" LCD_DEVICES="bayrad cfontz cfontz633 glk hd44780 lb216 lcdm001 mtxorb ncurses text" LINGUAS="de" USERLAND="GNU" VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia" Unset: CPPFLAGS, CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, FFLAGS, INSTALL_MASK, LC_ALL, PORTAGE_COMPRESS, PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS, PORTDIR_OVERLAY
I'd like to see if there are any errors in your dmesg when things go bad. A couple of keywords in bugs make me cringe. Forcedeth is one of them. :)
(In reply to comment #5) > I'd like to see if there are any errors in your dmesg when things go bad. A > couple of keywords in bugs make me cringe. Forcedeth is one of them. :) Sorry for the late reply, but it took some time (in fact, days) to make the bug show again. Unfortunately, there are no errors in dmesg or /var/log/messages :-/ This is another thing which makes this so bloody hard to debug - no messages, errors, nothing :-(
Can you test with gentoo-sources-2.6.32 and post the results.
