On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 08:47:49PM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 10:58:24AM +0100, Nicolas Joly wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I use, at home, a pretty old i386 machine with a VT82C686A IDE
> > controller supported by the viaide(4) driver. It worked fine until
> > recently (SATA support changes ?), but now i'm experiencing some
> > problems ...
> > 
> > The machine becomes unresponsive with not so heavy disk access; by
> > example, while trying to create/update system building tools. At that
> > time, after recovering, simply getting a new xterm show that the disks
> > get 100% busy for a few second.
> 
> I can't see how the SATA changes could be responsible for this; the code
> used by non-SATA controllers was not touched. Do you get any message
> in dmesg ? Are you sure your box is not swapping ?

I currently have no real evidence that viaide changes are involved,
but the problems started at the same time, when i upgraded my system.

Unfortunately, no message at all in dmesg ... And no, my system is not
swapping. For now, just before and during the hangs, `sysstat -w 1 vm'
command report a 100% disk usage, and the disk light is always on.

-- 
Nicolas Joly

Biological Software and Databanks.
Institut Pasteur, Paris.