David Miller wrote:

From: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Date: Thu, 04 Jan 2007 17:26:27 +1100

quoted

David Stevens [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

       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.

Actually I missed your point that the multicast locks aren't even
initialised at that point.  So this does explain the soft lock-up
and therefore your patch is clearly the correct solution.

I agree too, therefore I've added David's patch as below.

I'll push this to the -stable branches as well.  This fix is
correct even if it does not entirely clear up the soft lockup
bug being discussed in this thread, but I think it will :-)

We were able to reproduce the problem twice on the un-patched 2.6.18.2 kernel in about
2 hours of our stress test yesterday.  I applied this patch (well, the
ipv4 part..the ipv6 won't apply to 2.6.18.2), and it has run the stress
test clean for a total of about 8 hours.

So, I do believe this was the problem we were hitting, and it seems fixed.

Thanks!
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear [off-list ref]
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com