[...]
> One thing to keep in mind that may be related - I have discovered
> that with some disk drives, attempts to access beyond the end of the disk
> will lock the thing up. It is possible that with the new page cache
> we are inadvertently requesting a sector that is beyond the end, and
> this is leading to a lockup. One way to test this is to simply look at the
> messages logged to the console and see what sectors we are trying to
> access when the thing locks up.
>
> I'm still hoping that someone will describe a scenario that lets me reproduce
> this problem on my test system.
[...]
See my message from today: With an AHA2940 I tried to swap to a
partition that was smaller than the signature suggested. The kernel
does not check this in time, therefore you get a very dead machine
(swapper executing).
Ulrich