System freeze when copying files

["Dan H." <dunno@stoptrick.com>]

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Hello,

whenever I copy large files (1.5GB and up) from one disk to another
(different physical disks, not just from one partition to another on the
same disk or within one partition), my system locks up completely. Not
just X and stuff; the console as well and there's no sshing into the
box. This happens both when copying between ATA disks and when copying
from ATA to a portable USB harddisk.

The bug seems to strike only if actual data is transferred from one disk
to the other. dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=3k of=somefile works just as
well as dd'ing big files into /dev/null, but dd if=bigfile of=newfile,
where oldfile and newfile reside on different physical disks crashes the
machine. It doesn't matter if I use cp or dd for copying.

There seems to be some jam on the data highways, because when I throttle
traffic like so:

cat infile | (while dd count=20000 ; do sleep 1; done) | cat >> outfile

I can transfer arbitrarily big files.

Now my question is: For which package do I file a bug? Kernel?


Thanks,
- --Dan



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