kernel freeze and ntfs read access

[Andreas Goesele <Goesele@hfph.mwn.de>]

Hi,

since some time I experience very unpleasant system freezes. The
culprit seems to be the ntfs driver of kernel 2.4.21.

After installing this kernel I started to get the error message:

  NTFS: Unicode name contains a character that cannot be converted to
  chosen character set. Remount with utf8 encoding and this should
  work.

I therefor changed my fstab entry to:

/dev/hda1       /disks/ntfs   ntfs   nodev,nosuid,ro,iocharset=utf8,umask=0 0 0

The next day the freezes started ...

The freezes "normally" occur during daily cron tasks, with heavy disk
activity, and I can reproduce them with high probability by doing a
find on the ntfs drive. (Not that I like to experiment with that too
much ...)

My questions:

Is this a known bug? Where should I report it?

Is there an alternative to iocharset=utf8 which would prevent the
freezes but nevertheless support all the characters? (They should be
all latin1 or whatever corresponds to latin1 in the windows world, I
suppose.)

Thanks a lot in advance!

Andreas Gösele