stability issues with 2.4.20-ac1 (was: ethernet-ATM-Router freezing)

[Marc Haber]

On Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 09:49:58AM +0100, Marc Haber wrote:
> we use Linux to terminate ATM PVCs and to move the traffic coming in
> on the ATM link to Ethernet. We have two parallel machines with
> identical hardware (about two years old), in a Debian GNU/Linux setup
> built in November 2002. Current kernel is 2.4.20-ac1, and the setup
> hasn't been touched since December 2002. One of the machines does the
> work, while the other is waiting to be activated in case of failure.
> Max load is about 6 Mbit, the machines are mostly idle. At least I
> won't call them loaded.
> 
> A few days ago, the "active" machine has started spontaneously
> freezing. The freezes don't happen at times with especially high or
> low load, they don't happan during the same time of day. The freezes
> are complete:
> - no network respose on the ATM link
> - no network response on the Ethernet link
> - no response at all on the system console
> - no error or panic messages on the console
> - no response to Magic SysRq
> - atsar doesn't show any strange patterns in CPU/memory usage
> - syslog doesn't show anything strange
> - mrtg doesn't show anything strange in network load
> 
> Reset button is needed to revive the frozen box.

In the mean time, we started experiencing the same behavior on routers
that have only ethernet interfaces, a web server and my personal
workstation. All machines run kernel 2.4.20-ac1, and downgrading to
2.4.19 seems to solve the problem in all cases. I am now pretty sure
that I am not experiencing bad hardware.

I am now running my personal workstation with 2.4.21-rc7, but cannot
comment on that kernel at the moment.

Are there any known stability issues with 2.4.20-ac1?

Greetings
Marc

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