5.4-RC2 freezing - ATA related?

[Mark Pheffer]

> Elliot Finley wrote:
> 
>> This has been happening since 5.3-R, I've been tuning different 
>> parameters
>> to no avail.  I've taken the disks off of the onboard ICH5 controller and
>> put them a promise TX4 S150 controller, but still the same thing happens.
>>
>> The system freezes, but isn't totally dead.  It'll still respond to 
>> pings,
>> the screensaver still functions, but it won't respond to a CAD at the
>> console.  But if I press 'Enter' at the console, it'll give me a 'login:'
>> prompt, but after entering the username, it never comes back with the
>> 'password:' prompt.
>>
>> After manually resetting the system it boots and says 'Automatic file 
>> system
>> check failed; help!' and drops into single user mode.  Running fsck 
>> manually
>> corrects errors on all volumes.  Then it'll boot from that point.
>>
>> This seems to be triggered by daily periodic as it happens at 3:02-3:03AM
>> each time.  But it doesn't happen *every* morning.
> 
> 
I've had a similar problem with an IBM Thinkpad A21p. The machine would 
slowly start to lock up until the only thing it would respond to were 
pings. This would usually occur when the filesystem was under a heavy 
load (like untarring openoffice). I managed to trace the problem to 
snapshots that were about 40 days old (I keep old snapshots around for 
CYA purposes). After deleting the old snapshots, the system functioned 
perfectly.

I've been running it pretty hard now for the last few weeks and it 
hasn't locked up once. Whether or not the snapshots were the cause of 
the problem or just another symptom I can't really tell but deleting 
them definitely cured the problem. Right now I have a filesystem 
snapshot that's about a week old and it seems to be just fine.

Mark