Comment 60 for bug 624877

Thanks to Ted for clearly elucidating the two competing issues. For the time being we can't move from 10.04 (whole OS upgrades tend to be unpopular with customers for point releases). However as the kernel lock is always triggered by dpkg I'm hoping that just fixing dpkg will be enough. I assume if you make the system quiescent enough but shutting down all I/O the kernel will eventually un-wedge itself and allow a sync() based dpkg to complete?

Anyway I've tested Michael Jeanson's patch and I can confirm that even under a highly I/O loaded system dpkg now does work it's way (slowly) through a bunch of packages and eventually completes. I'm fairly happy to ship it in our products repositories although of course look forward to upstream finally adopting the fix.

Are there any regression tests I can run against dpkg to make sure nothing else is broken?