PROBLEM: 2.4.19 & 2.4.20 hang without oops...

[Charlton Harrison]

Hello Everyone,

I'd like to report a (probable) kernel bug in v2.4.19 and v2.4.20.
This problem does NOT appear in 2.4.18 and I've had to go back to
that kernel for now.

The problem is as follows:
While attempting to copy about 50GB of data onto an NFS-mounted partition,
the `cp -a` process will go for a while, then my machine will hang/freeze up.

I can reproduce it very easily and quickly on kernel 2.4.19 and 2.4.20,
and most of the time happens before even copying 10GB worth of data.
I am unable to reproduce the problem on kernel 2.4.18.

Here are the specifics:

HARDWARE:

Dual (SMP) P3-500,  supermicro MB,  512MB ECC buffered SDRAM.
3c905b ethernet card.
EIDE hard drive operating on a 16MHz (UDMA *disabled*) bus.

SOFTWARE:

Compiled the kernel with Redhat GCC v2.96.
(I also compiled v2.4.18 the same way and it works)

I am very concerned about this bug and that it doesn't seem to be fixed
in the latest Linux 2.4 kernels.

For additional information,  please feel free to e-mail me.  Or, if you
happen to know something about this bug already,  please e-mail me.

Thanks!

Charlton Harrison
[e-mail]