XCdroast/cdrecord crashes kernel 2.4.18 when mastering on the fly

[Jeffrey J. Kosowsky]

  When backing up a partition on the fly, XCdroast/cdrecord crashed (which is
  forgiveable) but it also crashed my Linux system (which is
  not). System and consoles were totally unresponsive, requiring a
  dreaded unclean reboot.

  Joerg schilling (maintainer of cdrecord) suggests problem is with Linux
  kernel and not with 'cdrecord'
  
  Any thoughts on what might be going on?
  
  Note that mastering-on-the-fly seemed to work OK if I just backed up a
  couple of very large tar files, while the crashes seem to occur when
  backing up a partition with multiple files. This difference is
  explained perhaps   by the extra overload of mastering multiple
  small files vs. a few large tar files.
  
  My system setup is as follows:
  * Brand new 24x10x40 Hi-Val CDR
  * CD recording software
    cdrtools-cdda2wav-1.11a23-1.i386.rpm
    cdrtools-mkisofs-1.11a23-1.i386.rpm
    cdrtools-cdrecord-1.11a23-1.i386.rpm  
    cdrtools-devel-1.11a23-1.i386.rpm
    xcdroast-0.98alpha10-1.i386.rpm
  * Relatively pristine RH 7.3 running kernel 2.4.18
  * System hardware is a bit old and slow (Pentium 200 MHz Overdrive
  in an old P100 Intel Aladding/Zappa PCI Motherboard)

  Even with the older system hardware, I would hope that we could get
  Xcdroast/cdrecord to at least die gracefully if things are too slow
  to master on-the-fly.

  Thanks,
  Jeff