cat /dev/hdb > /dev/null DoS

[Karel Kulhavý]

Hello

I have 2.8 GHz Pentium IV with 1GB RAM and 250GB ATA-133 IDE disk
on /dev/hdb.

I did cat /dev/hdb > /dev/null and after a while (5 minutes),
the system went totally unresponsive:

1) man top takes 3 minutes to display man page
2) Switching between console and X takes also a couple of minutes
3) top shows this:

Cpu(s):  1.4% us,  1.4% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa, 97.3% hi,  0.0% si

/dev/hdb is auxilliary disk that is not used, is not mounted and the
root filesystem doesn't reside on it (of course). Kernel version is 2.6.3.

Is this behaviour normal?

Cl<
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