I am running a web crawler in a Xen-based VM (on Linode); it makes heavy use of network namespaces to control use of VPNs on a per-crawl-process basis. It's been running mostly continuously for the past six months.
Intermittently - at a rate of once or twice a week - the dispatcher process goes to tear down a network namespace, and I hit a kernel bug. The visible symptoms of the bug are that it becomes impossible to create new network namespaces until the VM is rebooted, and the syslog receives floods of this message, again, until the VM is rebooted:
MMM DD hh:mm:ss XXXXX kernel: unregister_netdevice: waiting for lo to become free. Usage count = 1
I have been able to find some public bug reports relating to this message ...
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=880394
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1065434
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1181315
... but they all apply to kernels much older than the Linode stock kernel, which has been 3.16.x for quite some time now.
I am looking for concrete, step-by-step advice on how to work around the bug and/or turn this into an actionable bug report. Note that a regression analysis is not practical as it would take months to produce a result (and I can't afford to be taking the crawler up and down even more than I already am).