MTD - DOC 2000 freezes on umount

[Mark Richards]

I've been through several good learning experiences getting my development
system set up to work with a DOC 2000 for an embedded project.  I've finally
settled on a RedHat 7.2 distribution and the 2.4.24 kernel.  All worked well
with the MTD drivers in several other setups: RedHat 9, Mandrake 9.2, but
for reasons I can't yet fathom, the MTD drivers seem a bit unstable in this
particular kernel.

Most frequently when I perform a umount /mnt/doc (doc being the mount point)
the shell session freezes (the umount command does not return a prompt).

If I then perform a sfdisk -l /dev/nftla the command again goes off into
space with no return data.

Then the shut down hangs up.

I tried in one kernel build to apply the latest sources to my source tree
using the instructions (and the shell script) but this caused a compile
failure.  

May I have some suggestions as to how I can further diagnose this problem,
or what I can do to provide information that will help?

Many thanks,

Mark