Hi everyone!

I've installed Slackware 13.0 (32bit) on my PC to use it mostly as router + small server. And there is a problem with system load. Whenever there is some network activity it loads my cpu. Even if some other PC from my home network downloads smth from the internet through the Slackware.

Top shows "11.7%us, 41.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 12.7%hi, 34.3%si, 0.0%st" (notice the 34.3%si). And ksoftirqd/0 process takes more then 20% cpu.

First I thought that this is a kernel issue. I've tried building my own kernel. It didn't help. I've used a liveCD(actually it was archlinux install cd) to boot and it had no problems. But when I tried loading Slackware with liveCD's kernel the problem remained. So I'm guessing it's not the kernel.

I've tried clearing all iptables rules and disabling routing. I copied udev rules and modprobe.d from the liveCD. I disabled ipv6. I've prevented rc.inet1 from loading and used ifconfig to manually setup the network. None of this helped.

/proc/interrupts doesn't show anything out of the ordeneray.

I use a couple of "Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)" as my LAN adaptors. I've tried both 2.6.29.6 generic and huge w/ and w/o smp support.

I would realy appreciate any kind of help. Thanks.

It looks as if these softinterrupts are from the driver itself.

Do the Slackware and Arch kernels have a different version?

Yes, they do. Arch is 2.6.24 and slackware is 2.6.29.6.

But I've tried arch's kernel with arch's modules on slackware with no positive resault =(

I've also tried using arch's /etc (with slight changes of paths like /bin, /sbin ). It didn't help.
So I'm kinda desperate right now =)