Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 119875
ext3 I/O errors on /dev/hda when computer idled playing sound
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:39 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031030 Description of problem: If I let my computer idle, just playing music (using Rhythmbox or Totem), after a while (around 5 minutes) the music stops and the hard drive LED starts blinking and never stops. The computer doesn't answer to pings anymore and nothing moves on the screen... If I switch to virtual screen #1 before letting the computer idle, I can see, when the problem occurs, that I get a lot of I/O errors when trying to read from /dev/hda1. I'm not sure it's kernel-related but I assumed a bug with EXT3... Or maybe my hard drive is simply broken... Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1.Launch some music 2.Go for a walk (around 5 minutes) 3.Come back Actual Results: The hard drive LED is blinking, and the computer is unusable (X doesn't answer, pings don't answer, sound stopped). You have to un-plug it. Expected Results: It should go on working. Additional info: If I let the computer idle all night long without any music, the proble doesn't occur, though I fail to see the relation with music. I could reproduce this bug using FC1's kernel 2.4 and FC2 test2's kernel 2.6, using ALSA and OSS. I never had this problem with Red Hat 9.
Since I filed this bug report, I enabled the screensaver (I had disabled it because I didn't want it to start when watching movies). Now that the screensaver is enabled (starting after 5 minutes of inactivity), I can't reproduce this bug at all. That said, I also performed all the upgrades up2date made me aware of (from rawhide).
I've disabled the screensaver again, and everything seems to be OK. I couldn't reproduce the bug anymore. So I guess it has been fixed in one of the updates.