Since updating my laptop to 2.6.23, occasionally all of my free diskClearly some process is still using a deleted file. However, if it doesn't happen with 2.6.22.x kernels, it would seem fall under the category of regression, in the "used to work" sense. Before going further you may want to be really sure that an older kernel doesn't do this, so no one wastes time on a non-problem.
space on my root partition will just go away, with no files accounting
for the space, with no odd messages in dmesg or my syslog. If I
reboot, I immediately have the proper amount of free space again. Here
is the output of a du -sx * on /, and the output of the df command
when the problem is occuring, followed by the same info after a fresh
reboot (literally just did the command in the failed state, then
immediately rebooted and ran the same commands again) - any thoughts
as to what might be happening?