DESCRIPTION: 

Attempt to copy a large file from an external HDD to a location in my /home partition results in a system freeze. The system freezes not long after the amount written to disk begins to exceed the 8GB physical RAM on this machine, but it's a different amount each time (between 7.7 and ~15GB).

Using Nautilus to drag-and-drop the system hangs immediately. Opening a Terminal window and using cp, it takes longer, but it will eventually hang.

I also tried piping tar | pv and using pv to limit transfer speed on the theory that perhaps this was a memory/cache issue. As I have ~8GB swap, I believe I can rule this out.

VERSION INFORMATION: Fedora 28 (kernel 4.17.6-200.fc28.x86_64)

HOW REPRODUCIBLE:

On my machine, any file > 7 GB has a high probability of reproducing this behavior. Any file > 15 GB has a near certainty of reproducing this behavior.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE:

See above --- I believe asking Fedora to handle any IO stream of sufficient size from one volume to another will cause this behavior.

ACTUAL RESULTS:

Keyboard and mouse unresponsive
Screen hang
File IO stops
It appears the system is completely frozen.

EXPECTED RESULTS:

File copied from one location to another without incident

ADDITIONAL INFO:

This is a laptop with Windows 10 on the primary SSD. F28 has a second SSD all to itself using Fedora's default partition setup (LVM, the home directory is 400+ gb with 350+ gb free). Not sure it matters, but the SSD is NVME (pcie 3x4).

The system is running an Intel core i5-8250 CPU with 8 GB RAM.

I am trying to copy from an external HDD formatted NTFS. This whole situation is a little boggling to me because I managed to get the files ON to the HDD from another, older laptop running F27, a few weeks ago.

POSSIBLY RELATED:

Another user on ask.fedora reports a similar problem: 
https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/124188/fedora-28-system-freeze-while-copying-large-file/

I suspect this existing bug in Bugzilla may be related:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1598462