Distribution: Gentoo 2005.0 Hardware Environment: ix86 (PII) Desktop Software Environment: Gentoo with either genkernel built 2.6.11-gentoo-r9 or 2.6.12-rc5; See atachments for .config and for dmesg Problem Description: from: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94772 First occurance was with 2.6.11-gentoo-r9; recurred with 2.6.12-rc5 Large transactions on a USB drive (LaCie Hard Drive Extreme Tripple 250Gb) hang the system. Both formatting the full sized partition, and writing 100-500mb onto a 10Gb formatted partition. Subsequent testing showed that setting noapic and acpi=off allowed a 512mb cp to complete. HOWEVER, I again started a 512mb cp to this drive and then when it had about 2 minutes to go or so, I issued a `shutdown +5 min` the system then hung once I recieve the message, system shutting down in 3 minutes. The cp did not entirely complete, stopping at 420mb. There are no messages on the console when this happens; system is hardlocked, and can't be pinged. Steps to reproduce: CASE 1, mkfs.xfs /dev/sda1 #where dev/sda1 is a 250GB partition CASE 2, (on a 10gb xfs partition) cp a file that's 64mb or more onto the mounted drive. Actual Results: CASE 1: The drive blinked that it was busy; it kept blinking that (with out making any discernable noise) for 8 hours. Unplugging USB had no effect. The console was unresponsive, the network interface wouldn't respond to pings. there were no messages from the kernel. CASE 2: the drive blinked that it was busy for about an hour; after the first 15 second the network interface stopped responding to pings; no console messages were printed. CASE 3: booting with noapic and acpi=off. cp a 512mb file to the drive. Success CASE 4: booting with noapic and acpi=off. cp a 512mb file to the drive, at half-way shutdown the system in 5 or more minutes. It should hang before the countdown or file cp is complete. [it can remain hung for a whole weekend]
Created attachment 5131 [details] .config Originally from Gentoo Boot CD 2005.0 adapted to 2.6.11-gentoo-r9 and oldconfiged to Linux 2.6.12-rc5
Created attachment 5132 [details] dmesg after first reboot after first hanging.
Does 2.6.13-rc3 work any better?
I looks like it might have, since I got no deadlocking: # time cp l /mnt/usb1/e;ls -l /mnt/usb1/e;time cat l >> /mnt/usb1/e; ls - l /mnt/usb1/e real 7m51.361s user 0m0.374s sys 0m12.518s -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 536870912 Jul 29 17:28 /mnt/usb1/e real 9m20.248s user 0m0.351s sys 0m12.272s -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1073741824 Jul 29 17:37 /mnt/usb1/e
If large I/O transfers continue to work okay, feel free to close this bug. If any other problems crop up, let us know. In case you're interested, 2.6.13 contains a new, different error-recovery scheme for usb-storage. Actually it's the scheme used by Windows. While it's not inherently superior to the old recovery technique, lots of drives and USB-IDE converters respond better to it. No surprise -- you can guess what the vendors use for testing! I can't be certain that a failure of error recovery was responsible for the hangs you experienced. It might merely have been the trigger for some deeper problem.
Yes I've worked with the drive a few days now; the entire 250gb were formatted as XFS (something that did not work previously), and large files were copied to and from it.