On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 10:44:22AM +0100, Janos Farkas wrote:

On 2005-01-21 at 15:44:44, Aurélien GÉRÔME wrote:

quoted

I am running 2.6.10 from kernel.org on Debian Sid ppc/x86, the same
issue occurs with 2.6.9. Though, 2.6.8.1 and previous are fine.

When my ISP connection via PPPoE (kernel side) goes down, reconnection
does not occur, and the kernel displays continuous:

kernel: unregister_netdevice: waiting for ppp0 to become free. Usage count = 1

BTW, I have seen many cases when this symptom annoyed me too, the last
one is that my shutdown scripts tried unloading the network driver
modules.  Is your setup doing this by any chance?  In my case,
apparently there were conntrack entries keeping the device in use,
which is almost useless when preparing to shutdown :)

Actually, it happens after my ISP's LCP echos are not coming anymore,
and then when pppd try to reconnect.

OTOH, I couldn't find a way to flush those conntracks, so I worked
around it by not rmmoding ethernet drivers.

I have conntrack modules loaded too. I will try removing 8139too
(on x86) and sungem (on ppc) if the issue occurs again. By the way,
I also have IPv6 loaded, since I use a dual-stacked connection with
native IPv6. How lucky I am! :)

In your case, it's probably conntrack too, I'd presume you are using
that PPPoE machine as a masquerading gateway, which by definition needs
connection tracking...  I'm not sure either if this is a "real" change,
I only vaguely recollect as some moons earlier this wasn't a problem in
2.6.

Yep, 2.6.8.1 works fine, this issue appears on 2.6.9 and 2.6.10. I
switched to a Debian 2.6.10 kernel for security reasons, and
the issue has not come yet. I had a glance at the changelog and
saw some network related patches. This is the -as patchset, see
<http://kerneltrap.org/node/4545> about it.

Cheers.