I do a rpm -Uvh some_stuff.rpm on my laptop and the process runs endlessly
until I kill it with kill -9. This is on reiserfs.
"top" shows high IO-Wait values (> 85%).

The same procedure runs w/o problems on a 2.4.21 kernel.
It also runs perfectly well on an ext3 fs.

Attached is the output of "MagicSysRq + T" and "sh scripts/ver_linux".

If you need further information, please say so.
I am not subscribed to linux-kernel, so please CC me, but I will also check
the archive.

Thanks,
-Rolf