Comment 25 for bug 352197

I recently switched to 2.6.31 and had the impression that the timeout behavior got worse. Anyway, I stumbled about this post http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=149171 which suggests to use "options nvidia NVreg_EnableMSI=1" in /etc/modprobe.d/options to cure freeze problems. That's what I did and now the timeout issue seems to be gone indeed. It looks it is in fact caused by interrupt problems between the SATA and NVIDIA drivers which go away with MSI. Listed /proc/interrupts for completeness

           CPU0 CPU1
  0: 1184963 71677 IO-APIC-edge timer
  1: 3085 90 IO-APIC-edge i8042
  8: 0 1 IO-APIC-edge rtc0
  9: 8 2 IO-APIC-fasteoi acpi
 12: 10773 3051 IO-APIC-edge i8042
 14: 96639 5469 IO-APIC-edge ata_piix
 15: 0 0 IO-APIC-edge ata_piix
 18: 7 4 IO-APIC-fasteoi mmc0
 19: 155 4 IO-APIC-fasteoi firewire_ohci
 20: 56051 1330 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb2, uhci_hcd:usb3, uhci_hcd:usb5
 21: 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi uhci_hcd:usb4, uhci_hcd:usb6
 22: 1887 82 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb1, uhci_hcd:usb7
 29: 56631 3275 PCI-MSI-edge ahci
 30: 0 0 PCI-MSI-edge HDA Intel
 31: 5445 9636 PCI-MSI-edge eth0
 32: 64 69 PCI-MSI-edge iwlagn
 33: 186568 1057 PCI-MSI-edge nvidia
NMI: 0 0 Non-maskable interrupts
LOC: 198888 518921 Local timer interrupts
SPU: 0 0 Spurious interrupts
CNT: 0 0 Performance counter interrupts
PND: 0 0 Performance pending work
RES: 146977 286978 Rescheduling interrupts
CAL: 5637 20157 Function call interrupts
TLB: 766 1110 TLB shootdowns
TRM: 0 0 Thermal event interrupts
THR: 0 0 Threshold APIC interrupts
MCE: 0 0 Machine check exceptions
MCP: 36 35 Machine check polls
ERR: 0
MIS: 0