I suppose so. To be precise, it's about using Swap on eMMC - to avoid problems, swap should be used *only* on microSD (no swap active on eMMC), if microSD card is available. Even slowest one help much, as flash doesn't work very well with concurent writes (but shouldn't have problems with concurent reads).

So, when you tar content of your SD card to eMMC, eMMC is bugged by writes to it + swap writes, which result in quite powerful slowdown. Add to it unoptimized swap-related settings, and you may get freeze

To fix it, apply my instructions from last post. Anyway, it shouldn't be related to kernel-power in... well, any way

/Estel