We are seeing a reliably reproducible panic when using the E1000 card over a private network. This crash occurs inside the guest kernel of a VM with some (we believe) unrelated network connectivity issues, running on qemu-kvm 1.1.1.
We have seen this on all kernel versions we tested, the earliest version being 2.6.32-5 on a Debian test VM. I can provide error messages from other kernel versions or distributions for comparison if it would be useful.
Add two machines to a VLAN where 192.168.0.1 is serving some file ('test.bin'), and 192.168.0.2 is using the Intel E1000 card.
On Arch Linux running 3.5.1-1 this produces a kernel panic as follows, within a few seconds:
[ 151.310977] BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at 51c39a07
[ 151.314106] IP: [<c01f35a8>] put_page+0x8/0x40
[ 151.314106] *pde = 00000000
[ 151.314106] Oops: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP
[ 151.314106] Modules linked in: cirrus syscopyarea sysfillrect sysimgblt drm_kms_helper ttm i2c_piix4 drm
serio_raw intel_agp microcode intel_gtt agpgart kvm_amd e1000 pcspkr i2c_core_processor joydev button psmouse evdev
kvm ext4 crc16 jbd2 mbcache hid_generic usbhid sd_mod pata_acpi ata_generic ata_piix uhci_hcd usbcore usb_common
libata scsi_mod floppy
[ 151.314106]
[ 151.314106] Pid: 387, comm: wget Not tainted 3.5.1-1-ARCH #1 Bochs Bochs
[ 151.314106] EIP: 0060:[<c01f35a8>] EFLAGS: 00210202 CPU: 0
[ 151.314106] EIP is at put_page+0x8/0x40
[ 151.314106] EAX: 51c39a07 EBX: 00000001 ECX: c07acdb8 EDX: ce350d40
[ 151.314106] ESI: cea51480 EDI: 000005a8 EBP: ce133da4 ESP: ce133da4
[ 151.314106] DS: 007b ES: 007b FS:00d8 GS: 00e0 SS: 0068
[ 151.314106] CR0: 80050033 CR2: 51c39a07 CR3: 0ec54000 CR4: 000006d0
[ 151.314106] DR0: 00000000 DR1: 00000000 DR2: 00000000 DR3: 00000000
[ 151.314106] DR6: ffff0ff0 DR7: 00000400
[ 151.314106] Process wget (pid: 387, ti=ce132000 task=cea92a80 task.ti=ce132000)
[ 151.314106] Stack:
[ 151.314106] ce133db4 c03deb8c cea51480 ce03c000 ce133dc0 c03debe7 cea51480 ce133e28
[ 151.314106] c0424bbc 00000000 ce1b5d20 ce133e38 ce133e08 c0334661 00000001 00000010
[ 151.314106] 6b5f2c4b cea92a80 00000000 00000001 ce133e9c 00000000 00000001 000005a8
[ 151.314106] Call Trace:
[ 151.314106] [<c03deb8c>] skb_release_data+0x6c/0xb0
[ 151.314106] [<c03debe7>] __kfree_skb+0x17/0x90
[ 151.314106] [<c0424bbc>] tcp_recvmsg+0x92c/0xb40
[ 151.314106] [<c0334661>] ? soft_cursor+0x191/0x200
[ 151.314106] [<c0442eab>] inet+recvmsg+0x6b/0xb0
[ 151.314106] [<c03d6584>] sock_aio_read+0x114/0x150
[ 151.314106] [<c0234237>] do_sync_read+0xb7/0xf0
[ 151.314106] [<c012a5dc>] ? pvclock_clocksource_read+0xec/0x150
[ 151.314106] [<c02a7ce4>] ? security_file_permission+0x94/0xb0
[ 151.314106] [<c02348e3>] ? rw_verify_area+0x63/0x110
[ 151.314106] [<c0234e7d>] vfs_read+0x13d/0x160
[ 151.314106] [<c0234edd>] sys_read+0x3d/0x80
[ 151.314106] [<c04caf5f>] sysenter_do_call+0x12/0x28
[ 151.314106] Code: 2c 1f c0 8d 4d fc c7 45 fc 00 00 00 00 e8 e1 fe ff ff 8b 45 fc 64 01 05 64 28 6c c0 c9 c3 90 8d
74 26 00 55 89 e5 3e 8d 74 26 00 <f7> 00 00 c0 00 00 75 17 3e ff 48 10 0f 94 c2 84 d2 75 05 5d c3
[ 151.314106] EIP: [<c01f35a8>] put_page+0x8/0x40 SS:ESP 0068:ce133da4
[ 151.314106] CR2: 0000000051c39a07
2012 Aug 15 16:01:58 localhost [ 151.314106] Process wget (pid: 387, ti=ce132000 task=cea92a80 task.ti=ce132000)
[ 151.314106] ---[end trace d015761e7dbf4ff2]---
2012 Aug 15 16:01:58 localhost [ 151.314106] Stack:
2012 Aug 15 16:01:58 localhost [ 151.314106] Call Trace:
2012 Aug 15 16:01:58 localhost [ 151.314106] Code: 2c 1f c0 8d 4d fc c7 45 fc 00 00 00 00 e8 e1 fe ff ff 8b 45 fc
64 01 05 64 28 6c c0 c9 c3 90 8d 74 26 00 55 89 e5 3e 8d 74 26 00 <f7> 00 00 c0 00 00 75 17 3e ff 48 10 0f 94 c2 84
d2 75 05 5d c3
2012 Aug 15 16:01:58 localhost [ 151.314106] EIP: [<c01f35a8>] put_page+0x8/0x40 SS:ESP 0068:ce133da4
The host machines are running qemu-kvm 1.1.1, kernel 3.5.1. Hardware is 2 x 8-core AMD Opteron 6128 and 128GB RAM.
Please let me know if I can provide any more useful information, and as always, thanks in advance.