Kicad stops responding while writing to disk until full

Software
1

Hi All,

What happened today was weird!! What I thought at first was a recovery action for a file but the operating system showed Kicad was ‘not responding’. The activity monitor, however, showed that Kicad was writing to disk until it stopped with the message that the disk was full. Couldn’t mak a screenshot of it because of this error. I didn’t so far reinstall Kicad to resolve the problem because I don’t know what and where the disk is written. Could anyone point me to what went wrong here?

17:42:15: can’t open file ‘/Users/hans/Library/Preferences/kicad/9.0/kicad_common.json’ (error 28: No space left on device)
17:42:15: can’t open file ‘/Users/hans/Library/Preferences/kicad/9.0/kicad.json’ (error 28: No space left on device)
17:42:15: can’t open file ‘/Users/hans/Library/Preferences/kicad/9.0/kicad.json’ (error 28: No space left on device)

Application: KiCad arm64 on arm64

Version: 9.0.0, release build

Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.2.6
FreeType 2.13.3
HarfBuzz 10.2.0
FontConfig 2.15.0
libcurl/8.7.1 (SecureTransport) LibreSSL/3.3.6 zlib/1.2.12 nghttp2/1.63.0

Platform: macOS Sequoia Version 15.3.2 (Build 24D81), 64 bit, Little endian, wxMac

Build Info:
Date: Feb 19 2025 13:05:44
wxWidgets: 3.2.6 (wchar_t,wx containers)
Boost: 1.87.0
OCC: 7.8.1
Curl: 8.7.1
ngspice: 44.2
Compiler: Clang 16.0.0 with C++ ABI 1002
KICAD_IPC_API=ON

2

There’s not much you can do to restore normal operation other than to free up space on your disc.

3

Aren’t there somewhere log files so I can find out what it wrote and where on disk kicad has written?

4

KiCad doesn’t write a log. You should find a way to inspect your file system to find by size, modification time etc. but that’s general OS system management, not about KiCad.

5

I think I found it: the back-up system of Kicad went berserk! I don’t know what it tried to back up but it wrote more than 180 Gb to disk…
Maybe worth to look into the back-up code to look for anomalies…

6

Usually looking into the source code alone isn’t fruitful for finding the bug. What exactly did it write to the disk?

7

Can you share a screenshot of the contents of the project directory (the place where the kicad_pro file is)?

8

Unfortunately I couldn’t make screenshot of the error messages on screen as the whole computer was blocked… The folder which exploded was the XXX.kicad_pro-backups. I’ve also no idea what triggered but it was an empty file I tried to close before Kicad became irresponsive and wrote the whole disk full.

9

I am mostly interested in the exact names of all the files in your project folder, not the error message.

There’s a known issue here that someone is working on a fix, but I want to make sure you are having the same issue and not something different.

10

Hi,
Meanwhile I’ve cleaned up but here two screenshots of the leftovers

Screenshot 2025-04-06 at 12.49.19
Screenshot 2025-04-06 at 12.49.19947×349 43.9 KB

Screenshot 2025-04-06 at 12.53.34
Screenshot 2025-04-06 at 12.53.34810×400 43.7 KB

Do I understand well: does a filename trigger this behaviour?

12

For what reason this post is hidden?

13

The comment by steve clark is hidden, not your post. But I agree the wording is kinda confusing

14

The filename or path to the filename is the trigger for a known bug that will be fixed in 9.0.2

The other reply is probably hidden because it was flagged; it looks like AI-generated (and is generally not helpful)

15

I’ll welcome 9.0.2 withe great pleasure as this costed me almost a day to get back to normal :-(…
AI generated… it looked like making sense to me; he (it) suggested: it could be related to disk write caching or file system issues.
Quite unlikely on the latest OSX operating system but it still could be.
Anyhow the cause is found (I hope).

Greetings

16

Sensible-looking nonsense, the AI hallmark :). As a KiCad developer, neither of those things actually make any sense at all when you know the details.

1 Like
17

I should have known better: Sensible-looking nonsense, the AI hallmark!!
Indeed, it’s a master in turning around the problem with nice words!!

18

For what reason this post is hidden?

19

Oeps; the link leads me to non existing or private page…

21

Above post seems a ‘tad strange’ to say the least?

22

After a while I decided to delete the user account (this was the only post of them). They can ask for refund they mentioned… somewhere.

1 Like