Hi TJ, Thanks for all that input. I am not yet very litterate with all the internals of the kernel, and about the tools to diagnose this. I also figured out that the 3c59x modules was constantly in the Ooops and other messages reportings from the kernel. That machine having 2 network cards, I switched to the other, and I do have less problems. It is a VIA network card (via-rhine kernel driver). I will have to make a few stress tests which this card, as I had other problems while recovering from the messed-up file system. Is there some work for the 3c59x driver to fix these ? Or are these network cards considered obsolete ? Pascal TJ wrote: >I am having the exact same problems with my linux box. > > I have a 486, 24Mb of ram, and a RAID 1 partition. The box runs >dhcp, xinetd, telnetd, and samba. It currently only serves the RAID 1 >partition via samba to a single Win98 box. >Under any large file transfer to the linux box, regardless of which >machine initiates the x-fer, the linux box kernel panics and dies. >Currently, I have tried running many kernels, upgrading to a different >glibc and rawhide kernel, and even scrapped RH and made an LFS >partition. I have also used multiple versions of samba and I have tried >using 3com's driver instead of the kernel driver. Nothing has fixed this >problem. Recently, I thought the network load was filling the physical >memory because the error was usually a "Unable to handle kernel virtual >memory paging request," however, I have tried both stock kernels and RH >kernels with the rmap VM system and both crash. I also increased >/proc/sys/vm/freepages to such large numbers that there was always over >a meg of free mem while a file transfer was going, but the box still >crashed. > The stack dump used to be from many different programs, but, after I >increased freepages, it seems to always be from the 3c59x module. I have >tried 3com's driver instead. It held up better under load, but still >crashed after about 15 minutes of file transfer via samba. > I do not believe this is a RAID problem as I get the same problem >with RAID turned off and sharing a regular non-RAID directory with >samba. > I now feel that, because two seperate drivers fail, this must be >some issue with the hardware. As I just found this problem and it seems >as if you have 3com card in the same family as mine, I am very confidant >now. If you search the mail list archives for the 3c59x driver, you will >find this problem many times over. I don't yet know the solution, but, >if you can, you might try a different networking card. I am going to >switch out the NIC cards between my Linux box and Win98 box and see how >that does. Hopefully it's not an issue between the two cards. > >
