Hi there!
As my system froze again right now, I've tried to reproduce it, tried to use
some of the hints given to me in this thread, and made the following
observations:
* The system freezes on heavy I/O on my sata-harddisks, especially when
copying mpeg-files (>2GB) from one disk to another.
* a "cat /proc/kmsg" started via ssh from another machine showed the last
lines
<4>ata6: timeout waiting for ADMA IDLE, stat=0x440
<4>ata6: timeout waiting for ADMA LEGACY, stat=0x440
* sysrq does not work at all (why?? I configured it identically to my
notebook, it works on the nb but not on the desktop. Simply no reaction
when pressing alt-sysrq-something, even under normal conditions.)
The sata-controller is an nvidia (onboard on my nforce-based mainboard),
driven by sata_nv-driver (The one from the kernel, no proprietary nvidia
chipset/sata driver installed). The kernel in question is a
gentoo-2.6.24-r8, I'll try an upgrade to the latest stable gentoo kernel.
Thanks to all who gave suggestions
Alex
