atl1c Ethernet Failing [Solved]

seanv775 · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2009 Posts: 7

I recently setup a new personal server with this motherboard. I was able to get the onboard ethernet working with the atl1c driver in the kernel. It worked fine while I was getting the system setup, however, when I started doing some heavy file moving and streaming across the network, it has started failing on me within about an hour. When it fails, the system no longer responds to pings and the system can't ping the router. I'm currently running the hardened profile on the 2.6.35-r2 hardened sources. Here is the output of lspci -vvv, my kernel .config and the message that shows up in dmesg when it fails.

Jaglover · Posted: Tue Oct 12, 2010 1:51 am Post subject:

Sounds like a hardware problem.

seanv775 · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2009 Posts: 7

chithanh · Posted: Tue Oct 12, 2010 8:15 am Post subject:

This could be an interrupt issue, but more likely the hardware is bad. Maybe see if you can reproduce this issue when booting from livecd.

seanv775 · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2009 Posts: 7

So I booted the system into a live ubuntu environment and proceeded to do the same operations, running a bunch of network traffic and it ran all day. I tried reinstalling the gentoo install with the normal profile and gentoo sources to no avail. If anyone has any ideas as to what would cause this other than hardware problems, I'm all ears.

Jaglover · Posted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 2:39 am Post subject:

Do you overclock. I've seen Gentoo having hardware crashes on overclocked hardware. Practically the only serious crashes I ever had since I switched to Gentoo.

seanv775 · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2009 Posts: 7

cach0rr0 · Posted: Fri Oct 15, 2010 5:59 am Post subject:

I'm finding much online that seems to point at this being a bug in recent kernels (unrelated to hardened-sources patchset)

example:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=625776
http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com/msg2569094.html
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/631545
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/619684

All failing at that same point, same line number, same file, with numerous different network cards.

I would suggest running an older hardened kernel (2.6.32 has been rock solid for me, personally).

If your reason for jumping to 2.6.35 was this http://www.ksplice.com/uptrack/cve-2010-3081
...remember you are running hardened-sources.

I tested that exploit, and also the "cheddar bay" (null pointer deref in tun.c, and others that followed) set of exploits, against both 2.6.29-hardened, and 2.6.32-hardened, and with PaX + grsec properly configured, it would not run.

seanv775 · n00b Joined: 08 Jun 2009 Posts: 7

I started rolling the kernel back and got as far as 2.6.31 with no change in the problem. I finally got it to work by rolling the kernel back up to the latest version and downloading the latest linux driver from the Atheros website and using that module instead of the one in the kernel.