Hi list, I am writing a network driver for the e1000 card. While doing the receive part, I saw that the kernel freezes whenever it reaches the netif_rx(skb) call. I was able to reproduce the same error when using a bare bones driver where I hard codde the skb data. Please see the code of that test function below. The data is that of a TCP packet (with IP and Ethernet headers). When I load the driver into a Virtual Machine, I see the VM process taking above 100% CPU in the host machine. The OS does not respond to input after this. If I comment out the netif_rx line it seems to be working fine. Thanks, Phani static void test_skb(void){ unsigned char t[] = {0x52,0x54,0x00,0x12,0x34,0x56,0x52,0x55,0x0a,0x00,0x02,0x02,0x08,0x00,0x45,0x00,0x00,0x2c,0x00,0x1c,0x00,0x00,0x40,0x06,0x62,0xa0,0x0a,0x00,0x02,0x02,0x0a,0x00,0x02,0x0f,0xc6,0x1a,0x1e,0xdb,0x4c,0x81,0x18,0x01,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x60,0x02,0x22,0x38,0x14,0x66,0x00,0x00,0x02,0x04,0x05,0xb4}; int len = 58; struct sk_buff *skb; skb = dev_alloc_skb (len + 2); if (skb) { printk("Allocated skb buffer\n"); memcpy(skb_put(skb, len), t, len); printk("step1\n"); //skb_put(skb, len); //skb->dev = dev; printk("step2\n"); //skb->protocol = eth_type_trans(skb, dev); skb->protocol = ETH_P_IP; printk("step3\n"); skb->ip_summed = CHECKSUM_UNNECESSARY; printk("step4\n"); //netif_rx (skb); printk("step5\n"); } printk(KERN_INFO"All Done"); if(skb){ dev_kfree_skb(skb); } }