kernel_task filling up disk Something weird just happened.
I got a warning that my disk was running out of space. I knew that it had like 15GB free before and wondered where all the free space went.
I checked Activity Monitor which showed me that kernel_task wrote around 16GB of memory to disk. I kept observing and noticed that it went up at a rate of around 1GB per minute.
This went on until there were 0 Bytes left on my disk. This made my macbook basically unusable. I couldn't even open Web pages and when i tried to shut it down, it froze.
I did a forced reboot and the lost memory is back now. kernel_task is not writing to disk like crazy as before either. Anyway, I'd like to know what happened there. Any clues about what could've caused this?
This happened to me once. I used Daisy Disk to figure out where the disk usage was coming from.

In my case, there was a problem with the coresymbolicationd cache, which was growing indefinitely, and continuing through reboots and reinstalls of the latest Combo Update.

After deleting /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.coresymbolicationd, everything returned to normal.

Next time this happens, I recommend taking a look with that utility.