It seems the problem is caused by some DMA related bug in the VIA chipset
and/or in the Linux DMA-IDE VIA driver.
I finnaly get rid of the freezes, by simply compiling the kernel completely
without IDE-DMA support. Now hdparm shows disks do not use DMA and
the system is stable, as far as I can say now.
I've tested it VERY intensely last couple of days and
did not manage to freeze it. For 12 hours a lot of concurrent processes
copied gigs of data all over the disks, calculated
CPU intensive crypto etc, the system hasn't frozen. For debugging purposes
I also tried to downgrade to 2.2.19 with IDE-DMA activated.
It crashed. So it really seems DMA is the problem here.
Maybe I did not describe the freezes accurately in my first post. After the
freeze, the screen always went black,
and the system was dead - did not respond to pings, keyboard etc. It was
neccessary to hard reset it.
Tomas
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