Hi, I've been hitting on the diff with iperf and ifconfig up/down cycles. It didn't trigger any watchdog issues (though I've never seen any on this box soo take it with a grain of salt). As Hrvoje said, the box is smoother under high load..
I'll continue hitting it and I'll give the diff a better look. ps: Small nit the diff doesn't apply cleanly because the em_free_receive_structures part has already been commited.
