Timing critical portions of XFS at startup?

["Ian S. Nelson" <ian.nelson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm debugging a bizarre bug right now.   I'm building a tiny embedded
box and I'm using XFS.  Right now I've got a kernel (2.4.8 based) that
crashes when I add printks to it and doesn't crash when I remove them.
The crash is always in XFS code,  xfs_trans_get_buf is where it usually
happens.    For the most part things seem to be rock solid.

To make things more wired.  If I take USB out of the kernel (is spawns
some threads that I think are problematic) then I can pretty much printk
until my heart is content.  It's a NSC Media GX1 based product.   The
feeling is that there is something pretty sensitive to timing that get's
disturbed but it's just a guess right now.  Any ideas?

thanks,
Ian