From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; es-ES; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040514 Description of problem: If I mount an USB memory stick and try to write or read a large amount of information, e.g.: cp -a largedirectory cp largefile the computer gets blocked and does not respond for a while. After one minute or so, a lot of error messages (I/O error on /dev/sda1) appear in the screen and I recover control of the console. At this moment, I can umount the device but a number of error messages appear again. I cannot mount the device again until I restart the computer. The problem appears both with a fat32 and a ext2 partition in the stick. It also appear with a second stick. The device worked well before upgrading to Fedora Core 2. There are no problems with small files or directories (the limit is roughly 5-10 M or so) It looks like some sort of cache gets full and this produces the oops. I have seen bug 121636 (closed) but I am not sure if it is quite the same thing. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): util-linux-2.12-18 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Mount usb memory stick. 2. Copy a large file or directory to it. 3. Actual Results: The computer gets blocked. Expected Results: File or directory copied. Additional info: The computer is a rather old Pentium II. It this related?
This is a kernel problem. Please make sure to try the new kernel update 2.6.6-1.427 to see if it helps.
Could this problem be related with disabling DMA? I had disabled DMA at boot time because I have an old CD reader that is not compatible with DMA. But afterwards I have learned how to disable DMA only for this CD unit (via hdparm) without needing to disable it at boot time for all disks in the system. After doing this, the aparently unrelated problem with the USB memory seems to have vanished. (?) Does this make sense? I thought that DMA is only related with IDE disks and it has nothing to do with SCSI ...
Fedora Core 2 has now reached end of life, and no further updates will be provided by Red Hat. The Fedora legacy project will be producing further kernel updates for security problems only. If this bug has not been fixed in the latest Fedora Core 2 update kernel, please try to reproduce it under Fedora Core 3, and reopen if necessary, changing the product version accordingly. Thank you.