Comment 4 for bug 174724

By definition a kernel panic is a linux kernel problem and not a userspace bug. There should be nothing that a user program can do that should be able to trigger a kernel panic, without a kernel bug. In this case, the bug isn't even in any ext3 filesystem code, but rather a kernel soft lockup while doing some block device I/O. 2.6.20 is a rather old kernel, so it would be interesting to see if the problem can be reproduced on a more modern kernel.