The following autofs configuration (mounting ISO images via loopback) leaves orphan loopd processes and modprobe processes. They seem to be growing and I suspect I will need to reboot my machine after a couple of months. # auto.master /home/belvedere/CD-ROM /etc/auto.d/cdrom loop # auto.d/cdrom * -fstype=auto :/home/belvedere/Software/ISO/& After 2 weeks of uptime, I have about 100 each of modprobe processes and loopd processes. Most of he modprobe processes are marked status DN, and most of the loopd processes are marked DWN. Each of the processes appears to have active file handles. Restarting autofs doesn't help since these processes appear orphaned.
I think these are known bugs in previous versions of loopd. Reassigning to kernel.
If this is the 2.2.16-22 kernel, known bug. Upgrade to the errate kernel which has the fix. I'm closing this bug as "fixed in errata". If the errata kernel does not fix it for you, please reopen the bug.