However, yesterday I got a message saying that there was less than 2GB left on my hard drive.   The last time I checked I had over 20GB free, so where did it all go?   After a bit of investigating I found two giant 10GB kernel log files /var/log/kern.log.

It seemed that the computer was constantly logging the same messages:

CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 208[ 8973.550089] CPU0: Temperature/speed normal

CPU0: Temperat cpu clock throttled (total events = 2080190)

I had a look on Google and it turns out that it is a bug with the new Karmic Koala update:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/453444

So far there’s no patch for it, so the best solution I came up with was just to turn off the logging.

Step 1:
Look in /etc/rsyslog.conf and it will either have the configuration for system logging, or in the case of my machine it points to include all files in /etc/rsyslog.d/   In my case there was only one file in here so it made things simpler.

Step 2:
Open the configuration file in an editor and find the line which specifies kernel logging and comment it, something like:

#kern.*                         -/var/log/kern.log

Step 3:
Now restart the system log daemon:   sudo restart rsyslog

It is the logging which hogs the processor so by turning it off the problem is at least not noticeable.