CD recording and RAID

[Piotr Wajnberg]

I've got a RAID-0 setup and suppose a slowest disk io performance (like 300kb/s) during
CD recording is due to the recorder being on the same ide controller  as
my hard disks although md5summing is as fast as usual and can even  
starve the recorder causing the recording to fail.
What I'd like to know is why the system completely
freezes for the time a CD is being fixated. Here's the output of
vmstat for the final stages of fixation: 
 r  b  w   swpd   free   buff  cache  si  so    bi    bo   in    cs  us  sy  id
 5  0  0   6824   4508  10768 159036   0   0     0    80  172   745 100   0   0
 2  0  0   6824   4508  10768 159036   0   0     0     0  158   741  99   1   0
 7  0  0   6824   4508  10768 159036   0   0     0     0  158   700 100   0   0
 2  0  0   6824   4508  10768 159036   0   0     0     0  158   736  99   1   0
 5  0  0   6824   4484  10768 159036   0   0     0     0  151   703 100   0   0
 3  1  1   6824   4476  10784 159036   0   0     0    12  148   691 100   0   0
 5  1  1   6824   4476  10784 159036   0   0     0     0  151   580 100   0   0
 2  0  1   6824   3416  10808 159036   0   0     0    40  156   639 100   0   0
 6  0  0   6824   8864  10892 154936   0   0     0   253 9384 37130   3   0  97

As you can see from the last entry as soon as the the recording ends  the system 
catches up, as it were, with all the processes that were cut off from the processor. 
I'm currently using 2.4.20-ck2 because I thought the patches would cure the 
condition but they've made no difference. Could anyone, please, offer an explanation?

-- 
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