Herbert,
        You're right, I don't know whether it'll fix the problem Ben saw
or not, but it looks like the original code can do a receive before the
in_device is fully initialized, and that, of course, is bad.
        If the device for ip_rcv() is not the same one we were
initializing when the receive interrupted, then the patch should have
no effect either way -- I don't think it'll hide other problems.
        If it's hard to reproduce (which I guess is true), then you're
right, no soft lockup doesn't really tell us if it's fixed or not.

                                        +-DLS