A quick follow-up note:

The stress line that was running during the crash mentioned was: "stress --cpu 
8 --io 8 --vm 1 --vm-bytes 150M --hdd 2 --timeout 60". The "--hdd 2" option was 
a leftover that was not supposed to be there.  So that may have created a chunk 
more disk work for the processor.  Regardless, stress did not crash.  Ping died 
with the EMAC error mentioned, but stress was still running fine when I stopped 
it.


It's been suggested that stress may be eating up too much memory and causing 
the EMAC driver to do this.  That's a fair point, as these "WARNING: at 
drivers/net/ethernet/ti/davinci_emac.c:997 emac_rx_alloc" errors only appear to 
show up with stress running.  I suspect that could be true, though no other 
drivers or other applications are throwing similar errors.  When I've cranked 
stress too high memory wise in the past, I've seen it break out the 
oom-killer.  That's what I would expect.  Since I'm no longer seeing that, I 
suspect I'm playing within the bounds.  Regardless, should a userspace app 
sucking up too much memory cause a driver to crash?


I bring these questions here, as the crash's call stack shares so many 
similarities to the "SLAB crash" discussed 
"http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.arm.omap/78039/";, that I think 
they're related.  At the very least, the EMAC to EMAC performance issues we 
have always seen are troubling.  IMHO, clearly the EMAC driver is doing 
something a little questionable.

Thoughts?

Thanks again.
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