[ltp] a30 performance issue (related to ethernet?)

[Izaak Branderhorst]

Hello list!

Occasionally my a30 becomes really unresponsive for 1-3 minutes at a time.  
Symptoms include really laggy mouse movement, chocked IO, unresponsive  
apps, etc. but the CPU usage is always low. It seems to have something to  
do with the built-in ethernet device, because bringing down the network  
interface (eth0) fixes everything immediately. This kernel message is  
scattered all over my logs:

"e100: eth0: e100_watchdog: link up, 10Mbps, half-duplex"

Also, the problem occurs most often when there's a lot of network traffic.  
I've tried different kernels, kernel options, etc. with not much luck. The  
only thing that seems to have changed the problem a little was putting it  
on its own IRQ (from the thinkpad BIOS, from 11 to 10), but I could just  
be imagining things.

Does anyone have any clues?

System info:
a30 1.1Ghz 1GB ram running Arch Linux (current kernel is 2.6.15.4)

Izaak