system hangs when copying data to usb device

Dieter@be · 2011-02-02 13:02:56

Hi,
with both 2.6.36 and 2.6.37,
with my n900 mounted as usb mass storage device
with my pc (not tested on other pc's yet): shuttle SH55J2, Intel core i3 540

when I rsync a directory to a directory on the n900, it seems to work for a bit, but then suddenly the system freezes. mouse/keyboard don't do anything, display remains the same, sound playback gets stuck.
I could get a kernel panic after letting it being stuck for a minute or so, I'll try to make a picture next time I have this issue.

karol · 2011-02-02 13:36:33

So the copying simply stops or is it the super-high I/O or CPU that slows the system to a crawl?

Dieter@be · 2011-02-02 16:21:27

karol wrote:

So the copying simply stops or is it the super-high I/O or CPU that slows the system to a crawl?

I don't know whether the copying stops or continues. Although the system seems to freeze completely, so it probably stops. Especially when the kernel panics, it will have stopped

bt · 2011-02-02 17:09:45

I have usb keyboard problem - emacs, xterm, and other typing efforts with X running intermittantly freeze the gui for precisely 30 seconds.

If I type shutdown -h now X closes but it takes 30 seconds for the shutdown messages to run.
I have a spare usb keyboard that works the same way.

Dieter@be · 2011-02-02 17:18:56

bt wrote:

I have usb keyboard problem - emacs, xterm, and other typing efforts with X running intermittantly freeze the gui for precisely 30 seconds.
If I type shutdown -h now X closes but it takes 30 seconds for the shutdown messages to run.
I have a spare usb keyboard that works the same way.

and what happens after 30 seconds? if the system starts working again, that's probably a different issue then mine.

Leonid.I · 2011-02-02 17:22:37

Dieter@be wrote:

Hi,
with both 2.6.36 and 2.6.37,
with my n900 mounted as usb mass storage device
with my pc (not tested on other pc's yet): shuttle SH55J2, Intel core i3 540
when I rsync a directory to a directory on the n900, it seems to work for a bit, but then suddenly the system freezes. mouse/keyboard don't do anything, display remains the same, sound playback gets stuck.
I could get a kernel panic after letting it being stuck for a minute or so, I'll try to make a picture next time I have this issue.

I assume that you have found nothing in the logs... how do you mount the device? gvfs? Does it work, if you just use pmount/mount without starting the DE?

Last edited by Leonid.I (2011-02-02 17:23:01)

Dieter@be · 2011-02-02 17:24:45

Leonid.I wrote:

Dieter@be wrote:
Hi,
with both 2.6.36 and 2.6.37,
with my n900 mounted as usb mass storage device
with my pc (not tested on other pc's yet): shuttle SH55J2, Intel core i3 540
when I rsync a directory to a directory on the n900, it seems to work for a bit, but then suddenly the system freezes. mouse/keyboard don't do anything, display remains the same, sound playback gets stuck.
I could get a kernel panic after letting it being stuck for a minute or so, I'll try to make a picture next time I have this issue.
I assume that you have found nothing in the logs... how do you mount the device? gvfs? Does it work, if you just use pmount/mount without starting the DE?

I don't use a DE. just awesomeWM, and i use the mount command. not gvfs or such things.
I'll check the logs later tonight.

Dieter@be · 2011-02-02 20:55:14

alas, nothing relevant to be found in /var/log.

Leonid.I · 2011-02-02 22:20:40

Hmm... kernel bug... does this https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=574802 look similar?

EDIT: Do you by any chance, have the LTS kernel to test?

Last edited by Leonid.I (2011-02-02 22:22:06)

Dieter@be · 2011-02-02 22:33:54

Leonid.I wrote:

Hmm... kernel bug... does this https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=574802 look similar?
EDIT: Do you by any chance, have the LTS kernel to test?

that's exactly the problem I'm seeing. thanks.
Haven't tried lts kernel (and I don't plan to do so right now)

bt · 2011-02-02 23:30:22

Dieter@be
System starts again after 30 seconds.
Could this be a motherboard issue?

Dieter@be · 2011-02-03 08:41:07

bt wrote:

Dieter@be
System starts again after 30 seconds.
Could this be a motherboard issue?

I don't know. Start your own thread..

framas · 2011-06-12 19:58:24

I've got exaclty the same problem with my android phone.
I enable mass storage mount the sdcard partition and start to copy a big file (video podcast). First my system starts to respond very slowly.
My Windowmanger (kde) hangs and mouse and keyboard responding only after a few seconds after typing / moving. It seems for my that the system is under heavy load. So I was patient and wait a few minutes so maybe the file copy can finish and the system resumes to be responsive, but then It completly freezed. So I had to switch the power button (not even sysrq keys are working...).

Is my issue related to this?

The fedorra bug seemed to be very old, and I'm just wondering that the issue isn't fixed (if it's related). Currently I use kenel 2.6.39 and the bug was reported with 2.6.33. So I just wondered that there is no progress because it's really annoying not to be able to copy larger files.

ninian · 2011-06-12 20:17:04

It's always worthwhile trying again with the shortest USB connecting cable you have.
Some USB devices just hate being at the end of a longer bit of string!
I've got 2 or 3 devices which fail to be recognized or work erratically if I use an extension USB cable with them.

Draje · 2011-06-15 06:51:06

ninian wrote:

It's always worthwhile trying again with the shortest USB connecting cable you have.
Some USB devices just hate being at the end of a longer bit of string!
I've got 2 or 3 devices which fail to be recognized or work erratically if I use an extension USB cable with them.

Even with no extension (tested flash drive and microsd adapter), the hangs still occur. However, instead of everything freezing, I only have troubles with gui applications and synergy. urxvt and commands in it still run fine, though this too eventually freezes up if I copy for a while.

Running iostat shows this for the usb drive being copied to, while the other drives generally stay at 0 across the board (with the occasional jumps in r/s, rkB/s, and avgrq-sz from the drive being copied from).

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rkB/s    wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
sde               0.00     0.00    0.00   34.00     0.00  4080.00   240.00   140.57 6812.15    0.00 6812.15  29.41 100.00

Perhaps the system see the amount of IO load is active on the usb device and decide it's been waiting too long, thus giving it more resources in order to finish?

Also, are you using nvidia? Some have been saying that nvidia can cause the problems we are experiencing.

Last edited by Draje (2011-06-15 07:14:24)

Draje · 2011-07-07 07:00:10

Tried kernel-mainline (3.0) and the problem still exists. I'm curious if anyone is still experiencing this problem.

Last edited by Draje (2011-07-07 07:01:13)

Mikadoh · 2011-07-13 07:44:59

Same problem with kernel 2.6.39.2-x86_64 on two computers (desktop and laptop, both with ati).

Last edited by Mikadoh (2011-07-13 07:55:02)

molecula21 · 2011-07-21 21:35:33

My 2.6.39 hangs for like 30 seconds when i am transferring data to one particular USB pendrive, then i have control for a few seconds, and then the same thing again and so on until the transfer is complete. Is this hardware dependent? your systems freeze with EVERY usb mounted device?

ViruSzZ · 2011-07-21 21:48:43

Yeah, I'm experiencing exactly the same issue. I'm using the default x86_64 - 2.6.39-ARCH kernel, Gnome3 as DE, i3 CPU M 350 @ 2.27GHz, have hybrid graphics but the ati is disabled and am using the Intel one.

When I try to copy some data over to a USB, the transfer starts quite fast (30MB/s) and stops on 50% when my loadavg gets ~7.03 (700%) and the usb-storage and kworker are waiting on I/O and are getting my system in unresponsive state.

When using 'rsync -Waq' the transfer is somehow faster than using a GUI but its not that good enough. iotop reports the write speed to 3 MB/s which is too low IMO.

I will try using the -ck kernel and see if that will resolve this issue as it's a bit of annoying. Any tip, or pointing to some direction is welcomed.

Take Care Archers

abstrakct · 2011-07-26 09:16:33

I'm having this issue as well. First I thought it only happened with USB devices, but I found it also happens when copying files to an NTFS partition on an internal hard drive. From what I can tell from htop it's the IO-wait which is clogging all the pipes.

gymka · 2011-07-26 14:05:52

i had similar problem, my usb each time after use get slower, slower and finally it happen... when i copy something CPU load is 100%. so i formated USB drive and problem disappeared:) ofcourse still from time to time i have to format disk.

unikum · 2011-08-07 22:37:51

I have same problem with my desktop and laptop: when I copy a large files to usb flash stick X server freezes. I will experiment with shedullers (I think noop will give some result).

Last edited by unikum (2011-08-07 22:40:15)

fleed · 2011-09-02 10:58:52

I'm also having the same problem, using gentoo though (shouldn't matter). My kernel is 2.6.39-gentoo-r3 and scheduler is cfq. I'll also try another scheduler to see if that anything, also kernel 3.0.

fleed · 2011-09-02 14:56:17

I've just updated to gentoo's 3.0.4 kernel and this seems a lot better. Doing a "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc" is going a lot better than before. No freezes at all and the speed is also great. I'm getting just over 5MB/s on writes which is better than before. I think this has to do with one of the patches included in gentoo's kernel. It seems to include the first part of the patch that is referenced at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour … +bug/61235. Maybe you could look up your kernel's source to see if it has that change.

I haven't tried changing the scheduler and probably won't bother since it seems to be okay now.

Kilzool · 2011-09-03 13:48:12

I have the same problem. Linux 3.0.4-1 - X86_64 - XFCE4/Thunar/gvfs (though thunar-vfs is no longer).
ACTION: Connect a 2 gig USB memory stick. Copy from my ext4 fs a 700mb file *to* the FAT32 usb stick.
I have done this prior to LINUX 3.0xxx and that 700mb file would take seconds to complete. (excuse the pun, but it would zip right along) Now it CRAWLS, and seems to BOG DOWN,
however, it does complete the transfer, but I believe it took 2 minutes PLUS. So this FLASH drive is now a TURTLE drive. Reminds me of the days of the floppy disks.

Last edited by Kilzool (2011-09-03 13:52:50)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-02-02 13:02:56

system hangs when copying data to usb device

#2 2011-02-02 13:36:33

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#3 2011-02-02 16:21:27

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#4 2011-02-02 17:09:45

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#5 2011-02-02 17:18:56

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#6 2011-02-02 17:22:37

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#7 2011-02-02 17:24:45

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#8 2011-02-02 20:55:14

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#9 2011-02-02 22:20:40

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#10 2011-02-02 22:33:54

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#11 2011-02-02 23:30:22

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#12 2011-02-03 08:41:07

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#13 2011-06-12 19:58:24

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#14 2011-06-12 20:17:04

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#15 2011-06-15 06:51:06

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#16 2011-07-07 07:00:10

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#17 2011-07-13 07:44:59

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#18 2011-07-21 21:35:33

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#19 2011-07-21 21:48:43

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#20 2011-07-26 09:16:33

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#21 2011-07-26 14:05:52

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#22 2011-08-07 22:37:51

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#23 2011-09-02 10:58:52

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#24 2011-09-02 14:56:17

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

#25 2011-09-03 13:48:12

Re: system hangs when copying data to usb device

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