ext3 file system I/O blocks until reboot

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 13:35:54 +1100,
  Robert Davidson <rdavidson at obsidian.com.au> wrote:
> 
> So my questions are:
> 
> Are there any further diagnostics I can perform on the old file system
> to try and track down the problem?  If so, what are they?
> 
> Is this a known bug/problem with ext3 or something related to it?

I saw stuff like this happening starting with later 2.6.20 kernels that
wasn't fixed until the 2.6.24 kernels. (See bug 235043.) I wasn't using
VM's, so it might not be the same as the bug you are seeing. I do remember
seeing some other similar problems people were having that didn't appear
to be the same bug as I had when I did bugzilla searches. So you might
want to do your own bugzilla search to see what you can find.

I have also been getting disk IO lockups in F10, but in a more limited set
of circumstances. (Memory pressure on an X86_64 system.)