Comment 24 for bug 666211

Other people experiencing this issue may want to explicitly note the comment on this bug from Stefan (which is now somewhat buried) regarding the potential Xen IRQ misconfiguration in these kernels, and attempt that fix. Unfortunately, my test case is "run my business on this system for a day and wait for my website to go offline and millions of users to complain" ;P.

However, for what it is worth, I do not believe the current 2.6.37 kernel from Natty (2.6.37-12.26) experiences this issue. I was building a new m2.4xlarge database server, which the Maverick kernels do not support correctly (bug 667796), and therefore started experimenting with upgrading just the kernel to Natty (with an APT Pin and all that).

As the system seemed stable while building it and I knew the load characteristics would be drastically different on it than my previous web server backends, I decided to go ahead with it. Then, after that worked out for a while, I decided to risk moving all of my web backend boxes (the ones for which I was experiencing this issue) to that kernel as well.

So far I've been very happy with the results. To date, I've been forced to use Karmic, with its non-PV-grub kernel, field upgraded to Maverick. The kernels from Lucid were not acceptable (seemingly serious performance regression), and Maverick has been "right out" (given this horrendous I/O lock-up issue, and the m4.4xlarge 64GB no-go).