Comment 9 for bug 925309

This morning I found that there is another kernel upgrade available (3.0.0-16.29, up from 3.0.0-16.28). I installed this kernel and booted up into it with no trouble:

william@ishtar:~$ uname -a
Linux ishtar 3.0.0-16-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 14 12:49:42 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Running this kernel, I executed the qemu-img command to create a disk image that reliably causes this problem to occur:

william@ishtar:~/test$ qemu-img create -f raw Ubuntu-11.04-desktop.img 5G
Formatting 'Ubuntu-11.04-desktop.img', fmt=raw size=5368709120

This is running on my encrypted home directory. Watching in top, I saw this command alternate between 20 and 60% cpu until the image file grew to around 1Gb in size, then the CPU percent stayed pegged at 100% and the file did not get any bigger. Up to this point this is behaving exactly like the bug report issue; however, with this kernel I am able to kill this process. Ctl-C in the terminal killes the process, as does kill <PID>.

The VirtualBox VBoxSVC process goes straight into the consuming 100% cpu state when creating a big disk image. However, as with the qemu-img command, I am now able to kill that process, too.

At this time, the 100% zombie process problem seems to be fixed with this latest kernel update; however, the issue of creating gigabyte sized files with both of these tools on an encrypted home directory still exists. Both of these applications run with no issues on a non-encrypted directory.