Distribution: Debian Hardware Environment: P4 Northwood, 2 GB, i875, e1000 CSA Software Environment: pppd, rp-pppoe Problem Description: ADSL connection through PPPoE occasionally stalls for 30 to 50 seconds, especially under load. During these dropouts, packets are received but none that are supposed to be sent appear on ppp0. Ethernet interface continues to work, telnet session to modem does not stall. Exhibition of the bug is not affected by: SMP or uniprocessor kernel, Hyper Threading disabled or enabled, pppd version (tested with 2.4.2 and 2.4.4b1), rp-pppoe version (tested 3.5 & 3.8). CPU load is probably not a factor either. Dropouts seem to appear more frequently when the connection is under load (large Bittorrent swarms are a good test). They can appear as soon as a few minutes after start but it also took more than 5 hours once. Most of the time, they will appear every half to one hour. Problem does not occur with 2.6.15.7 or earlier. Second system with AMD64 SanDiego & NForce4 is not affected, will try to match configuration as closely as possible and retest. Kernel mode PPPoE using the rp-pppoe plugin does also not exhibit the bug. 2.6.17-rc3 .config: http://jawad.org/.config
Problem does no longer occur in 2.6.17.7. I have no information about the version where the fix might have been introduced.