The output of ksymoops, and some other miscellaneous information is
attached, as I promised.

The box is an AMD K6-300, with 64Mb memory, and around 130Mb swap
(from which ~110Mb was free, there was no VM pressure). It is running
Debian unstable.

What I did was to boot into my system as usual, then stop all
processes I didn't need. After that, I did a `touch /tmp/foo', then a
`sync'. /tmp is /var/cache/ext3test, despite the filename, it is ext2,
mounted from an ext3 partition (/) (see the output of mount below).

`sync' hung, and the load started to slowly increase, shortly before I
rebooted, it was almost at 3:

 12:02:26 up 6 min,  2 users,  load average: 2.97, 1.81, 0.78

(btw, before doing the `sync', the load was 0.99; with 2.4.14, my
usual load is between 0.20-0.50)

,----[ mount ]
| /dev/hda3 on / type ext3 (rw)
| proc on /proc type proc (rw)
| /dev/hda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw)
| /dev/hdd2 on /gnu type ext2 (rw)
| /dev/hdd1 on /gnu/mnt type ext2 (rw)
| /dev/hda6 on /gnu/work type ext3 (rw)
| /usr/bin/emacs on /bin/emacs type none (rw,bind)
| /gnu/work/cache-apt/archives on /var/cache/apt/archives type none (rw,bind)
| /gnu/work/lib-apt/lists on /var/lib/apt/lists type none (rw,bind)
| /gnu/work/cache-apt/archives on /chroot/base/var/cache/apt/archives type none (rw,bind)
| /gnu/work/lib-apt/lists on /chroot/base/var/lib/apt/lists type none (rw,bind)
| /var/cache/ext3test on /chroot/base/tmp type ext2 (rw,loop=/dev/loop0)
| devfs on /chroot/base/dev type devfs (rw)
| proc on /chroot/base/proc type proc (rw)
`----