Is this a hal bug?

[walt]

Remco Treffkorn wrote:
> On Wednesday 29 August 2007, walt wrote:

>> I'm having an annoying problem with hald_addon_storage (hal-0.5.9)
>> that I'd like your opinion on.
>>
>> I have an older HP CD burner which is becoming flakey:  I'll be
>> listening to an audio CD when the CD player will suddenly go
>> schizo and be unable to continue reading...
>>
>> Anyway, when this happens hald_addon_storage starts consuming all
>> the available CPU cycles which brings the machine almost to a halt.
>> If I'm very patient I can eventually kill the hald_addon_storage
>> process and the machine returns to normal again.
>> ... 

> I observed this also on FC6 2.6.20... Don't know what the hal version was, 
> since I upgraded to F7 2.6.22 and hal-0.5.9-8.fc7. This cured the problem.
> 
> The problem was with the ide driver. It sometimes got the hardware wedged and 
> the driver stopped working. When that happend hal-addon-storage would loop 
> with high priority and take all cpu. The mouse would not even move for tens 
> of seconds. If lucky and patient I could killall hal-addon-storage as root.
> 
> Since the upgrade to F7 I have not seen this. I don't think hal-addon-storage 
> has changed, I think the underlying ide problem got fixed.

I'm glad you mentioned that -- I tried playing the same CD on the same
hardware while running WinXP and had no trouble.  It must be a driver
bug, as you say.

> I planned on running strace on the hal-addon-storage pid, but never got around 
> to it. Maybe you could do this next time it happens, before killing it.

Here's a trace of gnome-cd during the problem.  The same pattern repeats
every 5 seconds or so until I kill gnome-cd:

ioctl(15, 0x80044121, 0xbfef4ff0)       = 0
ioctl(3, FIONREAD, [0])                 = 0
gettimeofday({1189364953, 40916}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=8, 
events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=11, event
s=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=12, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=13, 
events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=10, event
s=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=17, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=16, 
events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=18, event
s=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=19, events=POLLIN|POLLPRI}, {fd=20, 
events=POLLIN}], 12, 998) = 0
gettimeofday({1189364958, 50456}, NULL) = 0
ioctl(15, 0x80044121, 0xbfef4ff0)       = 0
ad infintum ......

After I kill gnome-cd then hal-addon-storage takes over the machine
the same way:

poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0)     = 0
open("/dev/hdc", O_RDONLY|O_EXCL|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE) = 5
ioctl(5, CDROM_DRIVE_STATUS, 0x7fffffff) = 4
ioctl(5, CDROM_MEDIA_CHANGED, 0x7fffffff) = 0
ioctl(5, SG_IO, 0xbfcca708)             = 0
close(5)                                = 0
gettimeofday({1189365449, 551088}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}], 1, 0)     = 0
ad infinitum....

Any idea what the underlying problem is?  Maybe the ide driver is
improperly holding a lock while it's waiting for the CD drive to
respond?