Hi,
  One thing I forgot to make clear ...

I mentioned problems with the etherH driver.

If you rely on the etherH driver then don't upgrade to the 4554 kernel as you
will have problems. These will range from more packet errors etc to the driver
hanging the entire kernel (DMA write failure that leaves the bus locked)

If you do need the new kernel for use with GDB and also use etherH then I can
only suggest ifconfig eh0 down when you run the 4554 kernel and use GDB and
then reboot with 4444 for your networking.
Ok this is not a nice solution but until I get the new etherH driver from Nut
there is not much I can do.

The reason for the sudden increase in problems with some drivers has been the
improvements in the interrupt system. The improvement mean that interrupts are
frequently nested. Some drivers have had problems with this as they were
relying on not being interrupted or specific timing that has been effected by
the reduced irq latencies etc.
Some of these problems are easy to fix (e.g. making correct use of splxxx())
but there are some problem that are more complex.
As I did not write the etherH driver I do not know enough of its internals to
trace the problem.
A complete rewrite of this driver has been done and that should be available
soon. In addition to working with the latest kernels, I believe it should be a
lot faster.

Cheers,
				Mark

-- 
Mark Brinicombe				amb@physig.ph.kcl.ac.uk
Research Associate			http://www.ph.kcl.ac.uk/~amb/
Department of Physics			tel: 0171 873 2894
King's College London			fax: 0171 873 2716