Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 187394
Pulling out firewire cable (to ext. DVD burner) makes machine hang
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:29 EST
Description of problem: I have an external Sony CD/DVD burner (model DRX800UL) which i connect to my laptop[1] (HP Pavilion ze4417EA) using a firewire cable (four-pin connector on the machine end), running FC5. More often than not, when I pull out the firewire cable, the machine hangs completely. I first[2] saw this using the kernel that came with FC5 as shipped, while I was logged into Gnome. A bit more investigation reveals that it also happens when I'm not logged in, i.e. both when gdm is showing and when the console is showing. The problem also persists when updating to the newest kernel using yum update. Getting logs of the crash was a little harder than usual. There were often some warnings in the log just before the crash, and these remained in the log when I rebooted. But nothing of the crash itself. However, when I got the machine to hang when I was in the console, viewing tail -f /var/log/messages, I actually got to see quite some error messages. They are photographed here: When I had just inserted the firewire cable: http://www.student.uib.no/~st01806/bilder/2006-03-30/dsc01363-besk-800x510.jpg When I had just pulled out the firewire cable: http://www.student.uib.no/~st01806/bilder/2006-03-30/dsc01366-besk-800x528.jpg Waiting a few seconds more yielded further errors: http://www.student.uib.no/~st01806/bilder/2006-03-30/dsc01369-besk-800x484.jpg [1] Description of the machine's hardware: http://home.no.net/harms/ze4400-linux.php [2] That is, the first time that I saw it on FC5; I also saw this on FC4 a couple of times, but did not report it. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 kernel-2.6.16-1.2080_FC5 How reproducible: Often. (More often than not.) Steps to Reproduce: 1. Have the external cd/dvd burner plugged in using the Firewire cable (four-pin connector) and turned on. 2. Pull out the firewire cable of the machine. 3. If the machine still works, repeat go to step 2. Actual results: Machine freezes. Expected results: Machine would continue to work as expected. Additional info: About the reproducibility: It's not "always", but it's not far from it either. I may see a slight pattern: If there has been any "use" of the dvd drive, then the machine freezes when I pull out the connector. By "use", I include any kind of activity that involved the drive, even the act of connecting it in the first place.
sbp2util_mark_command_completed takes a lock which was already taken by sbp2scsi_complete_all_commands. This is an upstream kernel driver bug and it is not specific to i686. Thanks for the report; I will try to come up with a fix.
I posted a patch: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?m=114391904218699 I will report back here once this is merged in an upstream kernel.
Fix is in Linus' tree now.
Also fixed in kernel.org's Linux 2.6.16.2.
A new kernel update has been released (Version: 2.6.18-1.2200.fc5) based upon a new upstream kernel release. Please retest against this new kernel, as a large number of patches go into each upstream release, possibly including changes that may address this problem. This bug has been placed in NEEDINFO state. Due to the large volume of inactive bugs in bugzilla, if this bug is still in this state in two weeks time, it will be closed. Should this bug still be relevant after this period, the reporter can reopen the bug at any time. Any other users on the Cc: list of this bug can request that the bug be reopened by adding a comment to the bug. In the last few updates, some users upgrading from FC4->FC5 have reported that installing a kernel update has left their systems unbootable. If you have been affected by this problem please check you only have one version of device-mapper & lvm2 installed. See bug 207474 for further details. If this bug is a problem preventing you from installing the release this version is filed against, please see bug 169613. If this bug has been fixed, but you are now experiencing a different problem, please file a separate bug for the new problem. Thank you.
I'm not able to reproduce the bug after several attempts here. Closing bug based on comments 3-5, which indicate we picked up this fix some time ago.