Bug#637199: oops when disconnecting an external hdd still mounted

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi Stanislav,

Stanislav Maslovski wrote:

> It happens if I pull off the usb cord of my external HDD dive when it
> is still mounted (I mount usb drives with automount; initially noticed
> the oops when disconnected the drive accidentally). An excerpt from
> the syslog is given below, from the time of connecting the drive. The
> disconnect happens at 15:39:05 and is immediately followed by an oops
> after which it is impossible to sync (the command freezes) or to
> reboot with Ctl-Alt-Del.

Can you reproduce this without the virtualbox drivers?  (Shouldn't make
a difference, but can't hurt to check.)

If it is still reproducible with a current squeeze kernel without the
virtualbox drivers, please also try a 3.x.y kernel from sid.  (The
only packages from outside squeeze aside from the kernel image itself
you should need in order to do so are linux-base and initramfs-tools.)
If it reproduces the oops, we can get help from upstream, and if it
doesn't, we can try a few intermediate versions from
snapshot.debian.org to find when the fix was introduced and try
applying that patch to squeeze.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan