High disk load +mount/atacontrol/NFS/SMBFS crashes the system

[Alejandro Pulver]

Hello.

I have experienced the following problem a couple of times in 2
different machines and FreeBSD versions (see below): when the disk is
continuously reading/writing my system becomes unstable (it's not an
everyday thing, but quite frustrating when it happens) and sometimes
crashes.

When copying from another machine by NFS/SMBFS more than one file at
the same time (or when using the disk, like during a filesystem check
in the background) often crashes (and the disk light indicator turns
off). Running "atacontrol ad0 mode UDMA100" when it was UDMA133 crashed
the system (the disk activity indicator was always on) when I tried to
solve the problem that way. Also when I was installing a port which
installs many files on the second machine without using NFS/SMBFS,
trying to mount a local NTFS filesystem (with kernel driver) crashed.

The first machine is an Athlon XP 2400+ with FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE and
custom kernel (see below) and the second one a new Athlon64 X2 3500
with FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE running in i386 mode, with generic SMP kernel.
See the boot messages and kernel config here:

http://people.freebsd.org/~alepulver/disk-crash.tar.bz2

Also I got (only twice, when checking the filesystem after one of these
crashes) the following error on the first machine, that I don't know if
it's related or not to the previous problems:

fsync: giving up on dirty
0xc51d6990: tag devfs, type VCHR
    usecount 1, writecount 0, refcount 806 mountedhere 0xc51a4000
        flags ()
	    v_object 0xc144cb58 ref 0 pages 3232
	         lock type devfs: EXCL (count 1) by thread 0xc54e2c00 (pid 837)
		         dev ad2s1f

I would appreciate any help.

Thanks and Best Regards,
Ale

P.S.: does this problem belong to a more specific list like
freebsd-hackers@?
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