Ubuntu klogd issue:

This morning, I left my Thinkpad X61 on my desk, downloading some files. After more than 3 hours, I came back to it and noticed that it was TOO HOT, even though the fan is working. I anxiously thought that the fan was failing AGAIN (yes, it has failed twice on me already). Aside from the abnormally high temperature, the Ubuntu startup logo (with the orange gauge) was also displayed. I think it was on the verge of shutting down because of low battery charge.

This was the second time Ubuntu hung, but I can't remember on what stage it was on during the first time (yesterday or the day before, early morning).

Anyway, I waited for it to respond but just like the first time, it wouldn't respond. I didn't bother to check if there was disk activity. So I forced it to switch off and let it cool down for a few minutes in one of the coolest areas of our office.

When I used it again with the same set of apps running, I noticed it was again getting too hot for comfort. And I also noticed that in conky, firefox was not the top CPU hogger, it was reporting my top two (2) apps as dd and klogd! I immediately googled for "ubuntu dd klogd eating CPU" and found this page which basically confirmed a kernel and/or iwlagn module issue/bug.

Sigh... so for now, I hope I will remember to stop klogd everytime I boot into Ubuntu... and that they fix it asap...