Hi WillBrown,

The figures show the kernel isn't blocked and your program isn't waiting on disk i/o.

If you look up the definitions of load average it is, roughly, a measure of how many processes are queued up waiting for the CPU but on some systems (and Knoppix/Linux may be one of these), it is the number of threads waiting to use the CPU. If sg_write_same creates a thread for each of the 14 disks and then each thread takes some semaphore around some critical operation, then 13 threads will be waiting. Looks like each thread takes the semaphore for a long time, instead of a short one. Looks like a bug in sg_write_same but that is, of course, speculation.

On Knoppix 6.4.4, the packages of interest are:

Code:
sg3-utils      1.29-1
libsgutils-2-2 1.29-1
BTW, scsitools is a different package - you had me confused for a while there.

Can you have a look to see what versions of these you have with your older Knoppix ? I suggest open a terminal and use grep to filter the output of dpkg -l.

There are no bug reports against either package in either the Debian or Ubuntu bug trackers.
The project home page is here:

Code:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/sg3_utils/
There's no bug list and to report a problem you need to register. There is also:

Code:
http://sg.danny.cz/sg/index.html
that looks like the author's home page but it too is hosted on freshmeat.net (?) and the author is Douglas Gilbert, which doesn't sound terribly Czech. There is a mailto: for him there. On the project site, my guess is he is dpgilbert.

The only other thing I can suggest is that one or other of these sites has .deb files for both packages for versions old and new. You might try some of these (on old and new Knoppix) to see if you can find out when the problem was introduced.

Either way, I think you are going to have to contact the author. Sorry I could not help you solve this on your own.