[vortex] eth0: Too much work in interrupt, ...

[Andrew Morton]

Hamid Reza Shahriari wrote:
> 
> Andrew,
> 'halt' or 'crash' in my mails means that I can't interact with
> Linux by console, telnet and serial interface, so I must press
> reset button.

Right.  That's a crash :)  In a low memory situation it could be caused
by lots of things, not necessarily the network driver.  I think the
reason you're suspecting the network driver is because you saw the "too
much work" message.

Are you sure that the "too much work" message and the crash are
correlated?

> Can you tell me what does mean /proc/sys/vm/freepages
> content? or where can I get document about it?

It is documented in Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt.  It contains three
numbers:

bix:/home/morton> cat /proc/sys/vm/freepages
256     512     768

So on this machine the memory allocation system will always reserve 256
memory pages (that's 1 meg) for use by low-level things like your
network driver.

Try

	echo "512 1024 1536" > /proc/sys/vm/freepages

to double the amount of memory which is reserved for the driver.

The fact that your system dies with both the 2.2.14 driver and with
Donald's v0.99Qk makes me suspect that the driver may not be the cause.