2.4 ate my filesystem on rw-mount

[Tobias Ringstrom]

I've never seen anything like it before, which I'm happy for.  The system
had been running a standard RedHat 7 kernel for days without any problems,
but who wants to run a 2.2 kernel?  I compiled 2.4.0 for it, rebooted, and
blam!  The RedHat init stripts got to the "remounting root read-write"
point, and just froze solid.

Rebooting into RH7 failed, becauce inittab could not be found.  In fact
the filesystem was completely messed up, with /dev empty, lots of device
nodes in /etc, and files missing all over the place.  I had to reinstall
RH7 from scratch.

I do not understand how this could happen during a remounting root rw.
Is the filesystem really that unstable?

Am I right in suspecting DMA, which was enabled at the time?  Any other
ideas?  Is it a known problem?

This is on a 450 MHz AMD-K6 with the following IDE controller:

00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586 IDE [Apollo] (rev 06)

[I know this is not a very good trouble report, but it will have to do for
the time beeing.  I hope to do more testing at a later time.]

/Tobias

PS. This is _not_ the same system that I reported IDE busy errors for.