Every time it happens to me I'm in X and I can't move back to a console to see any thing. It is certainly frustrating because Linux is usually so reliable. I've not noticed anything relating to large IO though as you are experiencing. Just USB related stuff. In fact I'm going to launch into a Linux/USB related rant. USB, particularly USB Storage, support in Linux has always been extremely crap. I've never really found it to be reliable. It might not be Linux's "fault". It might be crappy cheap Taiwanese hardware that is the problem but Windows seems to handle this cheap hardware much better than Linux does. Back in FC1/2.4 days my Casio Camera's USB docking station didn't work right. I could never get transfers from the camera to work reliably so instead I used windows (which worked fine without Casio specific drivers). On 2.6 it seems to be much more reliable, thankfully. Currently I'm having the vast majority of my problems with my USB2 external HDD. It is based on a Prolific Technology USB ATAPI-6 Bridge Controller which Linux treats as a SCSI device (as it does with all USB Storage devices). Often if I unmount and unplug (or power down) the drive I can't get it to re-initialise the next time I want to use it. Linux just refuses to detect the device or if it does it just spits out error messages. Sometimes I can remove all the USB kernel modules and reinsert them and the kernel recovers. Other times it "half" works, the bus detects the device but mount just locks up trying to mount the VFAT file system on the HDD. And as I've previously stated other times the whole machine just locks up a few seconds after I've removed the device from the system. On the whole, fucking crap. Perhaps one day we'll have decent USB storage support in Linux. Until that day I'll just continue to bitch as I don't have the knowledge to fix it myself. *sigh* The only reason I even want to turn off my external HDD most of the time is because when idle it makes this annoying ticking noise every few minutes that lasts for about 20 seconds. Almost like it is scanning the hard disk for some reason. I have no idea why it does this but it bugs me. Regards On Sat, 2005-05-28 at 16:15 +1000, Raymond Burgess wrote:
Oliver,
I initially tought it might just be X locking up, so I tried the copy from the Console and noticed the stack dump.
Switched back to 2.6.9 this morning, copied around 200 GB of data, and since that worked I was able to add the 200GB drive back into the degradded Raid 5 array which rebuilt fine.
Run memtest over night a few times to test the ram, but I'm blaming the kernel package as I have not had an issue all day, the machine only lasted 5 minutes (under load) with the newer kernel.
Would be nice to know what exactly the problem is but I have no leads at this stage. I am using two different IDE controllers in this machine so it might be a driver issue in the newer kernel.
Ray
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