[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#509027: hal: overloads the machine - have to reboot

[Nagy Gabor Peter]

Package: hal
Version: 0.5.11-6
Severity: important


On my laptop, if I have the DVD drive in place (hda), after some time I notice
that the system is not responding.

The KDE system monitor on the panel shows 100% kernel CPU time (I have core2
duo, and 100% means both cores are working hard).  When this happens, the
system appears to be frozen, when I move the mouse, the pointer reacts several
seconds later.

For a long time when this condition happened, all I could do was to switch off
the power.

Now I have found out that if I start shut down of the machine (keyboard
combination, because the mouse is unusable), the system actually shuts down,
but it takes like 15 minutes. (Actually today I had to switch off twice,
keyboard shutdown did not work)

When X is not running anymore, and I see the console, I see these messages
printed (or similar, I copy these from syslog):

Nov  7 10:09:18 karvaly kernel: [ 7613.343967] hda: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
Nov  7 10:09:18 karvaly kernel: [ 7613.343967] ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Nov  7 10:09:18 karvaly kernel: [ 7613.343967] hda: drive not ready for command

I'm not sure if I see the status timeout on the console, but I see the failed
opcode and the drive not ready.

Then very slowly the shutdown procedure is running, sometimes I can see a
message printed on the console among the continuous flow of hda error messages.

When the system stops hal, there are no more hda error messages, and the rest
of the shutdown process is completed fast.

So I assume that hal is trying to do something that overloads the machine. I
would expect that if there is a condition that causes this behaviour, this
condition could be treated differently... Like if it tries something, but does
not get a response fast enough, it should instead time out... you get the idea.
Or if the drive reports an error, it would be nice if hal chose to ignore this
drive (for a while or forever)

To have an idea about the speed of the shutdown process, here are the syslog
entries that are not related to the hda error:

Nov  7 10:08:48 karvaly shutdown[23251]: shutting down for system halt
Nov  7 10:09:13 karvaly init: Switching to runlevel: 0
Nov  7 10:12:53 karvaly kernel: [ 7828.637659] iwl3945: No space for Tx
Nov  7 10:12:53 karvaly kernel: [ 7828.637659] iwl3945: Error sending REPLY_LEDS_CMD: iwl3945_enqueue_hcmd failed: -28
Nov  7 10:17:03 karvaly /USR/SBIN/CRON[23303]: (root) CMD (   cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly)
Nov  7 10:21:08 karvaly postgrey: 2008/11/07-10:21:08 Server closing!
Nov  7 10:21:08 karvaly postgrey: Couldn't unlink "/var/run/postgrey.pid" [Permission denied]
Nov  7 10:21:09 karvaly postfix/master[2970]: terminating on signal 15
Nov  7 10:21:09 karvaly ntpd[2995]: ntpd exiting on signal 15
Nov  7 10:21:10 karvaly kernel: [ 8326.028338] fuse exit
Nov  7 10:21:10 karvaly acpid: exiting

I am sorry I can't give more information, but when this condition happens, the
machine is pretty unusable.

Regards,
Gabor



-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages hal depends on:
ii  adduser           3.110                  add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus              1.2.1-4                simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  hal-info          20080508+git20080601-1 Hardware Abstraction Layer - fdi f
ii  libc6             2.7-16                 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdbus-1-3       1.2.1-4                simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2  0.76-1                 simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libexpat1         2.0.1-4                XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii  libgcc1           1:4.3.2-1              GCC support library
ii  libglib2.0-0      2.16.6-1               The GLib library of C routines
ii  libhal-storage1   0.5.11-6               Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libhal1           0.5.11-6               Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libsmbios2        2.0.3.dfsg-1           Provide access to (SM)BIOS informa
ii  libstdc++6        4.3.2-1                The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libusb-0.1-4      2:0.1.12-13            userspace USB programming library
ii  libvolume-id0     0.125-7                libvolume_id shared library
ii  lsb-base          3.2-20                 Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  mount             2.13.1.1-1             Tools for mounting and manipulatin
ii  pciutils          1:3.0.0-6              Linux PCI Utilities
ii  pm-utils          1.1.2.4-1              utilities and scripts for power ma
ii  udev              0.125-7                /dev/ and hotplug management daemo
ii  usbutils          0.73-10                Linux USB utilities

Versions of packages hal recommends:
ii  eject                       2.1.5+deb1-4 ejects CDs and operates CD-Changer
ii  libsmbios-bin               2.0.3.dfsg-1 Provide access to (SM)BIOS informa

Versions of packages hal suggests:
pn  gnome-device-manager          <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information