hald-20070403 Makes CPU 100% Busy on 6.2-R Toshiba

[Dr. Gary E. RAFE]

While having a look at a client's Toshiba
Satellite Pro 6100 running 6.2-R the other day
for a non-Gnome related problem,
I became aware of hald (v20070403 built from ports)
consuming all free CPU cycles as reported by top(1)
when the keyboard seemed warmer than it should have
been...

Restarting the daemon via /usr/local/etc/rc.d/hald
settled the system back down to nearly 99% idle again.

I saw this behavior once recently while I had the
notebook in to upgrade Gnome from 2.16.x to 2.18.

My best guess is that hald started to eat up CPU
time when a umass(4) device was "unmounted" from
the system via Nautilus, though I can't be certain.

Since this is likely to happen again,
what kind of information should we be looking for
to help diagnose why hald is going berserk
like this (particularly since we probably won't
notice that hald is out-of-control until some
time after it's started to misbehave) ?

Regards --Gary
--
Dr Gary E RAFE: drgerlists at gmail dot com