External optical drive and memory leak

[quantum0726]

I have an external Plextor DVD burner. It works great on Mac OS X (at least in firewire mode, has issues in USB). When I connect it to my Gentoo desktop (either via USB 2.0 or via firewire) it works fine, but only for a minute or so and my system memory runs out. I have 1GB of RAM and usually at least 400 MB are free. When I power on the drive my memory goes to 0 in a few minutes. It starts to write to swap, but the computer slows down so much that it becomes unusable. I turn the drive off and waiting about 15 seconds and the computer is fully responsive with about 400 MB (however much there was to start) of RAM free again.

I've had this problem with my currently running hardened Gentoo kernel (2.6.17-r1) and with a Gentoo kernel (2.6.16-r12). My internal Plextor DVD drive works fine and this problem never occurs with it connected. Connecting an external USB hard drive does not cause this problem. There is no noticeable difference in CPU usage or other system vitals, just physical memory usage (and eventually swap usage when physical memory runs out).

dmesg using USB:
usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 13
usb 1-5: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
scsi5 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
usb-storage: device found at 13
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
Vendor: PLEXTOR Model: DVDR PX-740A Rev: 1.01
Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 00
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 48x/48x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
sr 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0
sr 5:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 5
usb-storage: device scan complete
ieee1394: Node changed: 0-01:1023 -> 0-00:1023
usb 1-5: USB disconnect, address 13

dmesg using Firewire:
ieee1394: Error parsing configrom for node 0-00:1023
ieee1394: Node changed: 0-00:1023 -> 0-01:1023
ieee1394: Node resumed: ID:BUS[0-00:1023] GUID[00d0a90535130051]
scsi6 : SBP-2 IEEE-1394
ohci1394: fw-host0: AT dma reset ctx=1, aborting transmission

Any ideas what might be wrong? Or what else I can try to debug this?
_________________
--Jayson

When Microsoft asks you, "Where do you want to go today?", tell them "*nix!"