finding and tracking a bug

[lockhart at irtf.ifa.hawaii.edu]

So, we have these fibre channel cards that we're using to receive data on.
 We've been having problems with them, and so sent one of our systems to
the company that makes the cards, and they figured out some of the
problems, basically a bug in their driver code was causing the system to
flake out.  So they fixed this, then ran into another bug:  when receiving
large packets (say > .5MB), and transferring them across the PCI bus
(forgot to mention this is a PCI card), if your system has >= 1GB of
memory then CPU usage suddenly jumps significantly, from
< 1% to (with a 1MB frame) 30%.

The vendor is indicating that this is a Linux bug, one they think will be
fixed by the Linux community "fairly soon." So, how do I go about finding
out about this bug, and how do I know when it's fixed?  I've never kept
track of the kernel development past updating practices based on the
current state.

-Charles