Dear all, I'm trying to deal with a peculiar problem that came up the other day. I've searched the net, posted in newbie groups, but to no avail. So, perhaps you can lend a hand: Using a 2.6.12.12 straight from kernel.org: - I experience loss of responsiveness (mouse, keyboard, music) during r/w intensive operations, such as lengthy computations in matlab (exceeding my RAM), or a simple system update using Debian's dselect. Mouse clicks and keypresses don't get lost, but xmms may skip the tracks. And all this happens intermitently during the mentioned r-w op. == This did not happen with previous kernels == - I had a case of FS corruption, which I could not trace. I use ext3, only one partition for the complete debian system. I keep my data in other partitions. Reason is a small disk in a laptop. This corruption made itself visible after a reboot, when I called top to check why bash was taking so long to complete a directory name (TAB press): rdrs@abafado:~$ top Segmentation fault Other outputs included: "can't execute binary file", "attempt to access beyond end of device" I ran e2fsck -vc to get a read-only badblock scan, but the latter came out clean. I had a lot of illegal inodes, though. This ext3 partition was never accessed by other OSs. == I use top on a dayly basis, so corruption happenned not long ago. There were no power outages, but the previous kernel (2.6.11) had NLS_DEFAULT=iso8859-1, whereas the new one has NLS_DEFAULT=utf8 == --- And, to sum up, I've been through a MEMTEST86, an E2FSCK, don't think the machine was cracked (not even literally speaking), and ran SMARTCTL -a /dev/hda. This one had an interesting output: there was indication of an error happening some 197 days ago. I could decipher the remaining info. Also, the REALLOACTED_SECTOR_CT has a very high number, though it is labelled "PRE_FAIL". I'm quite at a loss on what to do now - where should I start looking? And even if I simply replace "top", is that even possible, or advisable? Eagerly waiting for your answers, Jose -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/