usb-creator format disk causes udisks-daemon hogging mem and cpu

[Bill Wang]

Note: I restarted my system to get my computer working properly. These attachments may be useless.

I was trying to create a bootable usb stick with usb-creator. I clicked "format disk".

(What you expected to happen)

I expect this utilty to wipe my usb stick so that the iso can be installed onto it.

(What happened instead)

It said something like "dbus did not send a reply", and the system was frozen. I got into the tty and ran top there, finding that udisks-daemon is hogging both cpu and memory, and another process udisks-helper-modify-partion hogging only cpu.

Output from top

4343 root 20 0 8391m 3.1g 460 R 99.9 81.3 7:41.24 udisks-daemon
8593 root 20 0 20060 504 408 R 99.9 0.0 7:41.65 udisks-helper-m

the second process was truncated by top somehow

I have a dell inspiron 3421, which came with a ubuntu. I upgraded it to 13.10. I have udisks 1.0.4-8ubuntu1, usb-creator-gtk 0.2.50.1, in case these are useful

(PS My English is not very good. Edit my post if you wish.)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: udisks 1.0.4-8ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-15.23-generic 3.11.10
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-15-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2.2
Architecture: amd64
CustomUdevRuleFiles: 60-vboxdrv.rules
Date: Sat Feb 1 14:17:39 2014
DistributionChannelDescriptor:
 # This is a distribution channel descriptor
 # For more information see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistributionChannelDescriptor
 canonical-oem-somerville-precise-amd64-20120703-2
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-11-26 (67 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise" - Build amd64 LIVE Binary 20120703-15:08
MachineType: Dell Inc. Inspiron 3421
MarkForUpload: True
ProcKernelCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.11.0-15-generic root=UUID=fc929401-c420-44fa-a5e0-f0c74422ac08 ro quiet splash init=/sbin/e4rat-preload vt.handoff=7
SourcePackage: udisks
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2014-01-29 (2 days ago)
dmi.bios.date: 09/09/2013
dmi.bios.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.bios.version: A08
dmi.board.name: 0D94X7
dmi.board.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.board.version: A08
dmi.chassis.type: 8
dmi.chassis.vendor: Dell Inc.
dmi.chassis.version: Not Specified
dmi.modalias: dmi:bvnDellInc.:bvrA08:bd09/09/2013:svnDellInc.:pnInspiron3421:pvrNotSpecified:rvnDellInc.:rn0D94X7:rvrA08:cvnDellInc.:ct8:cvrNotSpecified:
dmi.product.name: Inspiron 3421
dmi.product.version: Not Specified
dmi.sys.vendor: Dell Inc.

[Bill Wang (dramforever)]

I tried this again with the same result. This time I made core dumps of:

1. the hogger "udisks-daemon"
2. the hogger "udisks-helper-modify-partition"
3. the two hogger's parent process, which is also "udisks-daemon"

I made them with kill -STOP pid && gcore pid

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Tessa (unit3)]

I just saw this behaviour as well. Here's the output of top I managed to capture with mem and cpu usage before it ground my system to a halt:

top - 12:03:51 up 14 days, 1:54, 4 users, load average: 5.22, 5.50, 3.16
Tasks: 297 total, 4 running, 291 sleeping, 0 stopped, 2 zombie
%Cpu(s): 2.9 us, 0.9 sy, 0.1 ni, 96.0 id, 0.1 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 16465108 total, 16297996 used, 167112 free, 0 buffers
KiB Swap: 11811176 total, 697772 used, 11113404 free, 70728 cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
17893 root 20 0 16.2g 11g 904 R 96.7 74.8 8:51.44 udisks-daemon
17912 root 20 0 30060 1128 812 R 96.7 0.0 8:53.24 udisks-helper-m
 1769 root 20 0 541m 302m 37m S 38.7 1.9 131:04.29 Xorg
 3524 graeme 20 0 2084m 367m 33m S 6.4 2.3 130:14.14 compiz
 5264 graeme 20 0 4107m 2.0g 13m S 6.4 12.7 1252:50 firefox
    1 root 20 0 27624 2308 636 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.67 init
    2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.12 kthreadd