USB I/O draining my userspace (Ubuntu Natty 64b)

[Ira Abramov]

First, an appology. I added another message on the RMS fiasco only to
find out later the threads all died out and I was committing a faux pas.
my appologies! please ignore I posted it if at all possible.

Second, here's my problem: I have here a workstation running an Athlon
3700+, and part of my job is to occasionally write out an image file to
USB universal card reader, testing the product of my builds. The writing
takes forever (since I haven't discovered how to get dd to write out the
sparse image to the CF card sparsely). Also, untill I moved the card
reader to one of the backpanel ports, the write would drag my entire
environment to a halt at the same time - even the mouse pointer gets
stuck at some point, until dd would finish. switching from front to back
panel and adding the oflag=dsync option solved the freַ¯ing of the
userspace but not the horrible writing speeds.

I have a feeling this is a major bug with the USBstorage driver or some
related module, but as this is old hardware running on the latest kernel
from Ubuntu, I am surprised. Anyone got a clue?

Thanks,
Ira.

-- 
Fastest gun in the west
Ira Abramov
http://ira.abramov.org/email/