Description of problem:
creating a partition on a RHEL 5 ppc64 system causes a kernel page fault.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
2.6.18-8.el5
 
How reproducible:
 

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Connect a RHEL 5.0 ppc64 system to a LSI storage array.
2. map 9 volumes of sizes between 1 Gb and 5 Gb.
3.attempt to unregister the device partitions with DM:
  kpartx -d -pp $device
  kpartx -d -p-part $device
  ($device is lun presented from the LSI array)
4. Clear up any previous partition tables: 
   dd if=/dev/zero of=$device bs=16384 count=1 1>/dev/null 2>&1
  ($device is lun presented from the LSI array)
5. make a partition label:
   parted -s $device mklabel msdos 1>/dev/null 2>&1
6. make 4 equal size partitions on each volume:
   my $start = 0;
   my $end = $partSize;
   for(my $i = 0; $i < $partnum; $i++) {
     `parted -s $device mkpart primary $start $end`;
     $start = $end;
     $end = $start + $partSize;
   }
7. all the above steps were included in a script to run on all 9 volumes.
  
Actual results:
when running the script, sometimes the host hangs at begining at the command "dd
if=/dev/zero of=$device bs=16384 count=1 1>/dev/null 2>&1".(step 3).
Sometimes, it passes on the first volume. but it fails at step 3 on the second
volume.
In all cases, the console on the host report the error below:
halfa Unable to handle kernel paging request for data at address 0x00000000
Faulting instruction address: 0xd0000000004680bc


Expected results:


Additional info: