Hi Steven

Is the system still usable when this happens? If so, can you configure
in ftrace, and run a trace on what ksoftirq is doing:

Well its slooooooooooooooooow since its only 5% of a 500Mhz arm v6 cpu.
So i can easy type faster than this thing echo characters on a serial console :-)

mkdir /debug
mount -t debugfs nodev /debug
cd /debug/tracing
echo <pid-of-ksoftirq> > set_ftrace_pid
echo function > current_tracer
cat trace

Well i tried the complete function tracer and i think systemload is just to high 
for this system but i will give it a try as soon as i see this error again.

When toying around with the hw debugger i think it runs somehow into do_coredump 
when this error hits and then somehow loops but since i was feeding the wrong 
symbol table to my hw debugger all this stuff looked even weirder today 8-/.

I was also toying around with setting the phy timeout in the driver and 
hacking in the phy interrupt, but nothing conclusive.

Best regards
Tim

dmesg output with phy irq enabled, either my hackish interrupt setting is not
working or the fec driver has a problem with phy interrupts... dunno:

nf_conntrack version 0.5.0 (1979 buckets, 7916 max)
fec_stop : Graceful transmit stop did not complete !
sched: RT throttling activated
FEC: MDIO read timeout
PHY: 1:00 - Link is Down
irq 103: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)
Backtrace: 
[<c002de30>] (dump_backtrace+0x0/0x110) from [<c024d780>] (dump_stack+0x18/0x1c)
 r6:00000000 r5:c794a2e0 r4:c031856c r3:00000000
[<c024d768>] (dump_stack+0x0/0x1c) from [<c0070930>] (__report_bad_irq.clone.5+0x2c/0xdc)
[<c0070904>] (__report_bad_irq.clone.5+0x0/0xdc) from [<c0070bf0>] (note_interrupt+0x19c/0x244)
 r5:c794a2e0 r4:c0318544
[<c0070a54>] (note_interrupt+0x0/0x244) from [<c006f724>] (irq_thread+0xf0/0x1f4)
[<c006f634>] (irq_thread+0x0/0x1f4) from [<c0057298>] (kthread+0x8c/0x94)
[<c005720c>] (kthread+0x0/0x94) from [<c00413d4>] (do_exit+0x0/0x2d8)
 r7:00000013 r6:c00413d4 r5:c005720c r4:c7bd9904
handlers:
[<c006f4c8>] irq_default_primary_handler threaded [<c01a1660>] phy_interrupt
Disabling IRQ #103
FEC: MDIO write timeout
init: avahi-autoip main process (423) terminated with status 1
init: avahi-autoip main process ended, respawning
eth0: Freescale FEC PHY driver [Micrel KS8041] (mii_bus:phy_addr=1:00, irq=103)
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
PHY: 1:00 - Link is Up - 100/Full
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready