Freeze with CAM (using KsCD)

[Olivier Certner]

 Hello all,


 I'm getting a problem when using KsCD, the KDE CD player, and the SCSI 
emulation for ATAPI devices within the kernel.


 A couple of minutes after having logged in with kdm, which launches a KDE 
session with a KsCD iconified, the whole machine freezes: apparently no more 
display update, impossible to move the pointer, etc. Pressing keys on the 
keyboard continues to work, but at a very low rate, ie if I do a CTRL+ALT+Fn 
to switch to console mode, I have to wait for 5 minutes... Then I'm sometimes 
able to login (sometimes keys are ignored), which means the kernel is still 
alive.


 Here are the logged messages I get every time the problem occurs:
kernel: atapicam0: timeout sending command=a0
kernel: atapicam0: error issuing ATAPI packet command
...repeated lots of times...
kernel: scsi_cd: error in readtocentries, returning EINVAL


 The only way I've found to avoid that is to deactivate KsCD in KDE. Despite 
that, I'm not totally sure if the problem is really trigerred by KsCD, since 
no precise visible operation seems to trigger it instantaneously.


 I use CAM in order to be able to burn CDs/DVDs, so I have compiled support 
for atapicam, among others, as these lines in my kernel conf file states:

device          ata
device          atadisk         # ATA disk drives
device          atapicam        # emulate ATAPI devices as SCSI ditto via CAM
                                 # needs CAM to be present (scbus & pass)
options         ATA_STATIC_ID   # Static device numbering
device          scbus           # SCSI bus (required for SCSI)
device          cd              # CD
device          pass            # Passthrough device (direct SCSI access)

 There is no support for SCSI's hard disk since I just want to use my CD/DVD 
units through the emulation.


 I'm using FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE for the kernel source (as well as for the KDE 
packages).

 Does anybody have heard something about that? It seems to me it is a bug but 
I would like some advices before submitting it.


 Thanks in advance for your answers. Regards,

  Olivier