Seeking help understanding my "emX: watchdog timeout" messages

[Rudy]

Jack Vogel wrote:
> Watchdog reset is an indication that the TX completion did not happen
> within a reasonable time, it can the symptom of a variety of problems.
> 
> You list a bunch of settings for polling, is this interface in POLLING
> mode?
> 

Yes, DEVICE_POLLING is in the kernel and kern.polling.enable=1.  I did not issue a
  "ifconfig em2 polling" and I see it running, so I assume that it is in POLLING mode.


em2: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
	options=1db<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,POLLING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4>
	ether 00:15:17:78:99:72
	inet 64.215.30.154 netmask 0xfffffffc broadcast 64.215.30.155
	media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseTX <full-duplex>)
	status: active

Interestingly, I also get the watchdog timeouts on my em4 (motherboard 82573E NIC).

In a 24 hour period, I see 8 'watchdog timeout' events.  4 on em2 and 4 on em4.  Both are uplinks 
to different cisco switches which vlan those ports to fiber uplinks.

Thank you for your time Jack,
Rudy