Gerald, Eugene, Thanks a bunch for your inputs. I've done a lot of different experiments that included using different storage media and the problem has been narrowed down to a serial driver contention.
>I would be suspicious that one of your drivers is blocking interrupts >for long durations, your mass storage driver in particular, although >serial consoles are also known for rude behavior as well. > Gerald, you may be right about this. Although I still don't know which of the threads in our system cause the serial resource contention, I temporarily alleviated the problem with limiting the messages that are being printed out to the screen. BTW, are you guys aware of any tool that could help me debug the threads that would concurrently try to access shared resources? Do you think LTT would be helpful for this particular problem (serial driver contention that leads to missing soft real-time deadlines)? Adam
