Linux – Fixing Network Interface Going Down with Speed Changed to 0 Kernel Errors

Over the last couple of days, the bonded network interface on one of our servers has stopped responding.

Looking through the kernel logs, I notice when the interface goes down, we are getting lots of repeated errors of the form:

[76019.645601] e1000e 0000:03:00.0 p9p1: speed changed to 0 for port p9p1
[76325.575540] e1000e 0000:03:00.0 p10p1: speed changed to 0 for port p10p1

Having had a quick search around for similar issues, I haven't been able to find anyone having reported this sort of behaviour before.

To provide a few more details on the server's configuration:

• Both of the bonded network interfaces are associated to Intel 82574L ethernet controllers.
• The server is running Ubuntu 16.04, with Linux kernel version 4.4.0-101-generic.

• The bonded network interface has the following configuration:

  auto p9p1
  iface p9p1 inet manual
  bond-master bond0
  
  auto p10p1
  iface p10p1 inet manual
  bond-master bond0
  
  auto bond0
  iface bond0 inet static
  address 10.0.0.10
  gateway 10.0.0.1
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  bond-mode 4
  bond-miimon 100
  bond-lacp-rate 1
  bond-slaves p9p1 p10p1
  dns-nameservers 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.3
  

• When the network interface goes down restarting the networking service on the server, by running service networking restart, seems to remedy the issues

I was wondering if anyone had experienced similar issues before and or has any suggestions for debugging the cause of something like this?