Comment 158 for bug 131094

Thomas Pi, first I need to thank you for very detailed testing you have performed. I can more or less confirm the same on my HP nw8440: feisty was the last version that worked nicely on my laptop. Even latest intrepid release did not help.

I notice that when machine get's unresponsive, that most of CPU (and this means both cores here) is occupied by io-wait. You can best see this with "htop" utility - just install it from the repository.
Also, during this "storm of load", CPU load gets to 8-10, resulting in high heat of my laptop and heavy work on the fan. "acpi -t" shows temperature around 80C, which is much more than I want to see on average.

Since I expect that this is not just scheduler related, but may be also something with HW, I would like to know what kind of IDE/SATA controllers do you have. I have ICH7.

I agree that priority should be increased and this should get more attention from kernel developers.