When an application runs which uses overlay (my case xawtv), and there is a large (~10-20M/s) disk transfer to or from a sata drive, the machine freezes. There is no similar effect when using an IDE disk instead, or a TV application which doesnt use overlay (e.g. tvtime). I fist noticed this when doing a copy of my IDE disk to my new SATA disk, and xawtv was running. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Turn on xawtv in overlay mode 2. Initiate a disk transfer to a SATA disk. Actual Results: System froze (bttv sound was still going, though). Expected Results: Not freeze No other programs where running at the time. Libata is used for the sata drive, and nvidia's driver for the gfx card. Machine specs: ASUS A7V600-X KT600 chipset Samsung 120G SATA drive Nvidia Ti 4200 gfx card. 1x512 DDR 400 stick The problem occurs with both gentoo-sources 2.4.25 and mm-sources 2.6.4. Gentoo-sources kernel is patched with libata6 driver. (sata_via.c version 0.11). Did some small tests with a vanilla 2.4.25 kernel, and libata16 driver (sata_via.c version 0.20), and using the nv driver for the gfx. Copied a large 1.5G file from one partition of the SATA drive to another on the same drive. Problem did not occur. So, I'm suspecting either the libata driver or the nvidia binary driver. I'll be doing some more tests later, but I could use some feedback from someone who knows better ;-) Btw, I've been trying to get a gentoo-sources kernel (2.4.26-pre) using the KERNEL_EXCLUDE var to prevent it from patching the libata driver, so that I could patch a newer one, but it doesnt seem to work. Thanks.
Does it oops? Are you able to see the oops? Could you try a 2.6 kernel and see if the error persists?
Nope, couldn't find any oops in the logs, and yes, the same thing happens when using mm-sources 2.6.4 I think the following has something to do with it, although it strikes me as odd, that in my case it only happens when using a sata drive. http://tvtime.sourceforge.net/problems.html#overlay Others have pointed out that it might have something to do with the BD (bus-disconnect) feature used sometimes to cool an athlon processor. (Disabled in my case). I'm waiting for a 2.4.26 kernel for which there is an updated sata driver to do some tests.
Have you done any more tests?
Yes. I'm running a 2.6.6 love4 kernel, which has the latest sata_via driver, upgraded the nvidia drivers to 1.0.5336-r3, the result is still the same: after a few seconds of disk activity, and xawtv running, machine freezes. (also tested by creating a new user on my machine). I guess it might have something to do with overlay and nvidia drivers. But it is strange that it only happens with the sata drive, not ide. I have switched to tvtime instead (which is far better than xawtv) and don't have any problems at all.
Love-sources is not something that Gentoo is supporting.
It just so happens that I use love at the moment. The same occured with gentoo-sources 2.4.x, mm-sources 2.6.x, etc.
