Why does my Sun Ultra 24 using an LSI 3041E HBA hang or lock up when copying files?

Problem:

In versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and 4 up to and including update 6, a race condition exists which causes hard lock-ups when copying large files to storage devices connected to the LSI 3041E HBA controller.

Resolution:

In these earlier releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the bug is triggered because of an incompatibility between the system BIOS and the kernel. The issue has been resolved in v33 of the system BIOS available from Sun.