Subject: eth0: too many iterations (16) in nv_nic_irq.

From: Jesper Krogh <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:19:35 +0200

I have a 2.6.29 kernel which fills up the "dmesg-buffer" with these:

eth0: too many iterations (16) in nv_nic_irq.

$ dmesg | grep -c "too many iterations"
1986

I have seen the commit below.. is the fix just to set the limit to 30 
instead? or is there a "real bug" underneath?

commit dccd547e2bf2c01a13c967ae03a705338394fad6
Author: Joe Korty <[email-masked]>
Date:   Wed Oct 29 14:22:16 2008 -0700

     forcdeth: increase max_interrupt_work

     This eliminates the following often-generated warning from my 64 bit
     Opteron SMP test stand:

         eth0: too many iterations (6) in nv_nic_irq

     According to the web, the problem is that the forcedeth driver has a
     too-low value for max_interrupt_work.  Grepping the kernel I see that
     forcedeth has the second lowest value of all ethernet drivers (ie, 6).
     Most are in the 20-40 range.  So this patch increases this a bit, 
from 6
     to 15 (at 15 forcedeth becomes the driver with third-lowest
     max_interrupt_work value).

     My test stand, which used to print out the above warnings repetitively
     whenever it was under heavy net load, no longer does so.

     Signed-off-by: Joe Korty <[email-masked]>
     Cc: Ayaz Abdulla <[email-masked]>
     Cc: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>
     Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <[email-masked]>
     Signed-off-by: Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]>