#6742 NORM Never A: SD & USB storage interferes with Activities' loading, Journal entries

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#6742: SD & USB storage interferes with Activities' loading, Journal entries
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 Reporter:  NeoAmsterdam                                                                            |       Owner:  wad           
     Type:  defect                                                                                  |      Status:  new           
 Priority:  normal                                                                                  |   Milestone:  Never Assigned
Component:  hardware                                                                                |     Version:                
 Keywords:  SD, USB, storage media, Sugar, Journal, performance degredation, unresponsive, lock-up  |    Verified:  0             
 Blocking:                                                                                          |   Blockedby:                
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 == Observation ==
 Presence of SD card in slot or USB thumb drive attached interferes with:
 Activity loading/execution; Journal's record of events; Sugar UI (locks
 up, semi-responsive)

 == Setup ==
 '''cat /ofw/bannername''' -> ''OLPC C2''[[BR]]
 '''cat /boot/olpc_build''' -> ''656''

 PNY 2GB SD card in slot, formatted on another Linux box by '''dd
 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sbd bs=1048576 count=16 ; fdisk /dev/sdb'''.  Made
 one FAT-16 (type 0x06) primary partition encompassing enire device, then
 '''mkdosfs -v ''My SD Card'' -F 16 /dev/sdb1'''.

 PNY 4GB USB stick formatted on Mac OS X (10.4) using DIsk Utility.
 Produces one FAT-32 partition (type undetermined) encomapssing entire
 device.

 == Symptoms ==
 Activities may fail to load.  Ex.: Terminal Activity takes 1 minute to
 load, locks up after idling for 5 minutes; Browser Activity takes 5
 minutes to load or is permanently "Starting"; Moon Activity takes >10
 minutes to load (if it runs at all); Write Activity is permanently
 "Starting"

 Journal entries fail to record Activities correctly, if at all.  Ex.:
 Browser history is not recorded, bookmarks lost; Files created in Write
 and SocialCalc are not writen/comitted; Terminal activity logged, but
 Journal entry shows no content

 System may not respond to request to sleep by pressing Power button
 (forcing a shutdown by holding the Power button does work)

 == Corroborration ==
 Symptoms also observed when using FAT-32 (type 0x0b) partition
 encompassing entire device and '''mkdosfs -v ''My SD Card'' -F 32
 /dev/sdb1'''

 Ocurrs on battery and AC power

 Running '''top''' (CTRL-ALT-Neighbourhood, login as root) shows <15% total
 CPU utilization when Activities are "Starting"

 Does not seem to ocurr ''outside'' of Sugar UI -- no discernable
 degredation of performace at runlevel 3 ('''/sbin/init 3''')

 Is reproducible, even with non-PNY media

 == Unknowns ==
 Use of JFFS, ext2/ext3 filesystems in stead of FAT; Inserting unformatted,
 unpartitioned, uninitialized media

 == Precedence ==
 Possibly related to existing ticket 6532 ("SD Card Corruption")

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6742>
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