Kodak USB flash reader causes freezes, panics

[Tim Howe]

I'm not sure if this should go here or to -bugs, but the other
USB-related reports put me in good company, I'm hoping...

I'm having a problem with a Kodak USB flash reader.  "camcontrol
inquiry" gives me:

  pass0: <Kodak CF/SD/MMC/SM 0108> Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device 
  pass0: Serial Number 
  pass0: 1.000MB/s transfers 

The device has printed on it:

  Kodak Multi-Card Reader       CE2A012
                                KP P/N 7E3771
                                ITEM# 20209416
                                P/N 680-070-563

Reproducibly, if I begin copying data to a Lexar 256MB CF card (P/N
2250, Rev. A), it works for a while, then freezes the system.  The first
time this happened it was when trying to unmount the filesystem.  The
second time was in the midst of copying data.  Both times the system was
completely frozen; not even the keyboard LEDs toggled.  Strangely, I
could connect on the SSH and FTP ports, but received no welcome banner.

The third time I modified the script I was using to copy my files to
sync and sleep after each file.  This time the system seemed to freeze,
then lurch through handling several interrupts (mouse pointer moved and
a menu popped up from right-clicking), then froze again.  Initially
connecting to the SSH port brought up the banner after a very long
delay, but an attempt to reproduce this was unsuccessful, and I was
unable to actually SSH in.

Mounting the filesystem synchronously doesn't seem to help.  The first
time it worked, but then when I unmounted and remounted it and copied
some more files it froze midway through.

I'm running FreeBSD 5.3:

FreeBSD beaker.data-secure.net 5.3-RELEASE-p8 FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE-p8 #1: Mon Apr 11 15:20:08 EDT 2005     root at beaker.data-secure.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386

I will be fairly busy for the next few days but later this week I should
be able to try out patches or set up a machine running a more
cutting-edge source tree, if necessary.  I've got FreeBSD 5.4-RC2
building today, actually; is it likely that this will solve my problem?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.