All this discussion is well and good, but I suspect there is a driver setup problem where the interrupt isn't being handled properly. Please retest with the latest version of skge driver (I just pushed patches to netdev about 2min ago). One patch changes to disable IRQ's from device for packets until device is brought up. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html