Is this a hal bug?

[Remco Treffkorn]

On Wednesday 29 August 2007, walt wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> 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 -- I suspect overheating
> because the CD case is very hot to the touch.
>
> 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.
>
> Obviously, hal is not responsible for making the CD burner flakey,
> but I do think hal could handle the problem more gracefully.
>
> Any thoughts would be welcome.
>
> BTW, I'm running gentoo linux with their most recent 2.6.22 kernel
> on an ASUS A7V8X mobo.
>

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 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.

Cheers,
Remco

-- 
Remco Treffkorn (RT445)
HAM DC2XT
remco at rvt.com   (831) 685-1201