Hello,

After upgrading my kernel from 2.6.18-164.15.1.el5 to 2.6.18-194.8.1.el5,
 I
found that my machine would go through periods of running very slowly wit
h
the mouse moving jerkily. Top showed 98%+ wait state, although nothing wa
s
going on.  The machine is an HP 64 bit dx5150 with 3G of memory and X1300

graphics.  I have been running the proprietary ATI fglrx driver because i
t
appeared to be the only way of getting a pseudocolor visual for the xwave
s
speech processing package, whose graphics are based on xview.  I've been
using it for several years and not seen anything like this before.

I noticed that hald-addon-storage was occasionally using large amounts of

cpu time polling my empty dvd drive, so I killed that process, but that
didn't solve the problem.  Then I found that the xwaves display was showi
ng
the wrong colors and scaling was distorted.

Reverting to the old kernel makes everything work normally again.  I susp
ect
that it's X that is the problem, although I don't know for sure.  Nothing

interesting shows up in the xorg log or any other log that I can find.

Has anyone else seen symptoms like this?  Any hints on what to try?  In
particular, is there a way of finding out what the cpu is waiting on when
 it
is spending all its time waiting?

Thanks.

Stephen Isard