tail broken (?!) and devices not activating

[Celejar <celejar@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I'm seeing some really weird problems on my system.  I don't know if
they're at all related, but I'll report them both in the same email, in
case they are.

1) tail -f stops working - I see the tail of the file, but it fails to
refresh when content is added to the file.  What on earth could be
causing this?  This is tail from coreutils - nothing fancy, no inotify
dependency, just simple polling of the file!

2) The system stops properly recognizing and activating external
devices (USB) that I plug in.  The kernel sees them correctly, as seen
in syslog / dmesg (after I stopped using 'tail -f' for this ...) - it
reports information like the physical attributes and partition table of
my external disk, and the brand of my external mouse, but the devices
don't actually start working - I can't do anything with the disk, and
the mouse's light won't even turn on.

I tried removing and reinserting various modules, and restarting udev
and various other services, and eventually got my disk to come online
(but the mouse is still dead).

Both these problems go away when I reboot, but seem to eventually
return, at least sometimes.  I have no idea of any trigger event.  This
is a laptop, which I frequently suspend (disk) and resume.  Kernel is
2.6.31-rc8 from upstream.

Anyone have any ideas of where I can look to try to track this stuff
down?

Celejar
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