Quote Originally Posted by Capricorny View Post
I have had a couple of instances of udevd losing control over itself lately. I'm not sure whether it is due to bugs or read/write errors, but it gets confused, uses all the CPU and memory, kills programs to free up memory and makes the system almost unusable. I have killed it, and restarted the daemon by issuing sudo udevd --daemon &. Everything seems to work just fine. But I'm curious as to what this is? I'm not able to see anything leading up to the situation in dmesg output. Anyone experiencing the same or similar?
Sounds pretty bad. Any chance this could be hardware? I'm particularly suspecting memory. There were problems awhile back with "cosmic rays" (high energy gamma particles, actually) causing memory cells to change state, leading to symptoms that could be compared to these (but more random.) If there's one bad bit that will be switched under circumstances you can't nail down, it might produce this effect. Anyway, you've found the trick to get it back under control again - good work, and thanks for sharing.

Cheers!
Krishna
p.s. I'm sure you know already, but for the benefit of others reading this, there is a memory test available at boot-time by typing at the prompt:
Code:
memtest