Encountered a baffling problem while copying large amounts of files from a archive (*.tbz) or from a remote system to a directory within a running UML system. The UML stalls while the IDE hardrive thrashes along for server minutes. It recovers, continues on with some more files, and stall again. While this is happening, all maternity's connected to that UML just freeze.
The host system is perfectly accessible and on show minimal CPU usages. A running top session within the UML also show low CPU and moderate memory usage. However the UML's load increases up to 3.x for several minutes and then recovers.
System Data:

Host:
AMD Athlon 2.1Ghz running Gentoo using 2.6.9 kernel with skas3 patch.
1 SCSI 18G drive (boot drive) and one IDE 15G drive.
1G tmpfs
UML:
Vanilla 2.4.27 UML kernel (patched of UML usage)
3G file system and 512M swap.
The UML is run using 512M of mem.
The UML runs from the IDE drive.

Thanks