Time to switch to Postgres
drbrain: We're getting a handful of reports of bizarre problems on 5... InnoDb and otherwise... trying to track them down but some of these appear to be caused by FBSD's threading libraries
My particular issue was first reported on Red Hat, so it seems that the real problem is that InnoDB is lacking proper locking diagnostic tools, like FreeBSD's INVARIANTS and WITNESS that help debug locking problems.
I only want a database that can make use of all of my CPUs without having to pray it won't lock up and die.