Fwd: freezes when transferring to USB

Hi.

I'm a very much end user, but this issue at hand is a kernel problem.

I'm running a custom made vanilla linux-3.0.4; when I transfer a large 
file to a slow USB flash device, there're random freezes in random 
applications -- top target is Chromium and Yakuake.

Someone told me this's cause of excessive dirty buffers in memory, but 
after trying a verity of combination from the kernel parameters in 
/proc/sys/vm, it didnt work.

By my understanding if the dirty pages exceed the dirty_ratio/bytes 
limit all IO freezes, but in my case applications in memory freeze, the 
I/O is not related. For e.g. the the Yakuake terminal drops down, it 
hangs for a minutes -- this action doesn't have to do anything with IO, 
but only in memory.

Then tabs in chromium hang randomly, this's again not related to I/O.

I tried reducing ditry_raio, dirty_background_ratio to 2, then I 
increased min_free_kbytes, but none of them matter. I noticed that even 
when an application freezes, there's ample of free memory.

This problem was not reproducible with vanilla kernel 2.6.38.
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