Comment 3 for bug 655835

I'm also experiencing this problem, and it has just started recently. No LVM, watershed nor PAE kernel in my case. I'm using 2.6.35-22-generic, and avahi-daemon 0.6.27-2ubuntu3.

It seems to be the main avahi-daemon that gets stuck, not the chroot helper:

  avahi 17408 66.6 0.0 3148 1620 ? R 12:02 3:47 avahi-daemon: running [dominic-desktop.local]
  avahi 17409 0.0 0.0 3016 444 ? S 12:02 0:00 \_ avahi-daemon: chroot helper

The stuck daemon can't be terminated with SIGTERM - I've had to use SIGKILL.

From stracing the daemon, it seems to be polling the time of day very quickly:

ioctl(13, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
gettimeofday({1289344983, 852429}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=6, events=POLLIN}, {fd=17, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN}, {fd=15, events=POLLIN}, {fd=14, events=POLLIN}, {fd=13, events=POLLIN}, {fd=12, events=POLLIN}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN}, {fd=10, events=POLLIN}, {fd=8, events=POLLIN}], 10, 258) = 3 ([{fd=13, revents=POLLIN}, {fd=11, revents=POLLIN}, {fd=8, revents=POLLIN}])
gettimeofday({1289344983, 852591}, NULL) = 0
ioctl(13, FIONREAD, [0]) = 0
gettimeofday({1289344983, 852729}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=6, events=POLLIN}, {fd=17, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN}, {fd=15, events=POLLIN}, {fd=14, events=POLLIN}, {fd=13, events=POLLIN}, {fd=12, events=POLLIN}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN}, {fd=10, events=POLLIN}, {fd=8, events=POLLIN}], 10, 258) = 3 ([{fd=13, revents=POLLIN}, {fd=11, revents=POLLIN}, {fd=8, revents=POLLIN}])

And every few seconds, when one of the arguments to poll reaches zero (the argument that is 258 above) it does:

time(NULL) = 1289344984
write(7, "W", 1) = 1
write(7, "W", 1) = 1
read(6, "WW", 10) = 2

Not sure how to interpret that, so I've attached the full strace.