CPU IOWait

[markosjal]

I have one of those Via C7-D processors with an Nvidia 8600 GS card. I use this system mostly for XBMC running on Linux Mint 13 Mate. I upgraded to 13 after multiple problems with disk corruption on Mint 10 and alwayds had the same issue arise every time with Mint 10 where the Linuix partition would become damaged after sleep . I usually ended up with a damaged OS and got tired and upgraded to Mint 13 on a new hard disk thinking maybe the disk was failing, bit never saw any tool confirm that

I use this system mostly for XBMC , but need the GUI from time to time and have installed several programs in it.

Now I have a new issue however and that is that Linuix Mint 13 seems to freeze . Usually I can move the mouse around, click on things that do not open but after a few minutes it seems to catch up and come back to life.

I installed in the taskbar or panel, the system monitor applets to see if they would tell me what was happening. What I see is that when this happens , the processor is showing IOWait.

Although it is hard to confirm this same behaviour seems to occur when I run XBMC standalone and the system just stalls for a few minutes and in XBMC sometimes never recovers.

ANy idea what is causing this? I never had this in Mint 10, it was a different problem completely. Could this be caused by Nvidia hardware or software? Maybe I need something special to properly support the Via chipset?

thanks,

Mark