Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Oh great. I have experienced random hangups of my Laptop recently, and I had absolutely no clue what caused them, even after a reboot and looking into the logfiles. Today, after another hangup/crash I think I found the problem (but not the solution):

May 16 00:08:35 localhost kernel: NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
May 16 00:08:35 localhost kernel: sky2 eth0: tx timeout
May 16 00:08:35 localhost kernel: x45 [sky2]
May 16 00:08:35 localhost kernel:  [pg0+943960755/1069376512] sky2_poll+0x469/0x548 [sky2]
May 16 00:08:35 localhost kernel:  [pg0+953407031/1069376512] nv_kern_isr+0x31/0x63 [nvidia]
May 16 00:08:35 localhost kernel:  [net_rx_action+82/199] net_rx_action+0x52/0xc7
May 16 00:08:35 localhost kernel:  [__do_softirq+52/125] __do_softirq+0x34/0x7d
May 16 00:08:35 localhost kernel:  [do_softirq+34/38] do_softirq+0x22/0x26
May 16 00:08:35 localhost kernel:  [irq_exit+41/52] irq_exit+0x29/0x34
May 16 00:44:32 localhost syslogd 1.4.1#17.2: restart.
May 16 00:44:32 localhost kernel: klogd 1.4.1#17.2, log source = /proc/kmsg started.

Note that I could do absolutely nothing on the laptop anymore, no moving the mouse, no typing on the keyboard, no switching from X11 into a text console, no CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE to kill X11, no CTRL+ALT+DELETE to reboot, nothing.

I think sky2 (network driver) or the NVIDIA driver may be the culprit (or a combination of both). After some searching it seems other people have/had similar problems, but not quite the same...

I guess I'll have to file a bugreport somewhere...