[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#614774: hald-addon-storage causes random lockups by polling optical drive

[Gergely Kiss]

Package: hal
Version: 0.5.14-3
Severity: critical
Justification: breaks the whole system


The polling mechanism used by hald-addon-storage sometimes makes the system
unresponsive. In fact, the kernel seems to be in a working state, but none
of
the user processes get any resources when this issue happens.

While encountering the issue, the following symptoms are noticable:

- the system responds to ICMP echo requests and TCP-connections
  can be made successfuly - the TCP/IP stack seems to be working
- running processes don't get any CPU time
- the crash dump generated by the kernel is never logged, it can only be
  seen on screen
- typing or switching between VTs isn't working. The only thing that can be
  done when the issue happens is rebooting the machine by using SysR
  commands or
  by pressing the reboot button

Disabling polling for the optical drive seems to workaround the issue, but
isn't really a fix for it.   

Please see the screenshot attached to view the crash dump.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=hu_HU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=hu_HU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages hal depends on:
ii  adduser                 3.112+nmu2       add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus                    1.2.24-4         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  hal-info                20091130-1       Hardware Abstraction Layer - fdi f
ii  libblkid1               2.17.2-9         block device id library
ii  libc6                   2.11.2-10        Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libdbus-1-3             1.2.24-4         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2        0.88-2.1         simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libexpat1               2.0.1-7          XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii  libglib2.0-0            2.24.2-1         The GLib library of C routines
ii  libhal-storage1         0.5.14-3         Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libhal1                 0.5.14-3         Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libusb-0.1-4            2:0.1.12-16      userspace USB programming library
ii  lsb-base                3.2-23.2squeeze1 Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  mount                   2.17.2-9         Tools for mounting and manipulatin
ii  pciutils                1:3.1.7-6        Linux PCI Utilities
ii  udev                    164-3            /dev/ and hotplug management daemo
ii  usbutils                0.87-5           Linux USB utilities

Versions of packages hal recommends:
ii  consolekit    0.4.1-4                    framework for defining and trackin
ii  eject         2.1.5+deb1+cvs20081104-7.1 ejects CDs and operates CD-Changer
ii  pm-utils      1.3.0-3                    utilities and scripts for power ma

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

-- no debconf information