From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20021216 Description of problem: I am seeing solid lockups whenever the system writes more than a tiny amount of data to the floppy drive (1.44MB HD, /dev/fd0H1440). My system is an Intel Celeron 2400 MHz on an Asus P4S800 motherboard (SiS 648FX, SiS 963L chipset). I've upgraded to kernel-2.4.22-1.2135.nptl.i686 and the behavior persists. What I find odd is that a Mandrake 9.2 installation with a kernel also based on 2.4.22 does not have this problem. With Fedora, I can _read_ floppies just fine (reading from the raw device, or a file system mounted read-only), but an attempt to write always fails. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.4.22-1.2115.nptl How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fd0H1440 Actual Results: System locks up totally. Reset or power-cycle required. Expected Results: No lockup. Additional info: Bug #111762 appears to be this same problem on a different platform (athlon).
Building a customized kernel tailored to my system appears to have made the problem go away. I made a lot of configuration changes, but if I can identify a particular change that seems to be responsible, I'll add another comment with that info.
The offending parameter is CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE. If I disable that feature, the floppy drive works perfectly. With that feature enabled, writing to the floppy locks up the system every time. In all the supplied Fedora kernel configurations, CONFIG_APM_CPU_IDLE is enabled. In the Mandrake kernel it is disabled.
thankfully CPU_IDLE can be turned off with a commandline option... Also can you attach the output from dmidecode to this bug? With that we can blacklist your bios for apmidle so that it will JustWork(tm) in the future..
Created attachment 96797 [details] Output from dmidecode
For the benefit of anyone who discovers this bug report while searching for a solution, here are the relevant kernel boot parameters that will prevent the lockups (for me, anyway): To eliminate APM entirely: apm=off OR, to stop just the CPU_IDLE BIOS calls: apm=idle_threshold=100
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/