QEMU – main-loop: WARNING: I/O thread spun for 1000 iterations

When upgrading the virtual machine I use, I stumbled upon an issue where the guest OS would hang every time when performing any kind of heavy hard drive I/O. Qemu monitor would only display:

main-loop: WARNING: I/O thread spun for 1000 iterations

Some digging led me to the following workaround:

diff -u a/vl.c b/vl.c
--- a/vl.c	2015-11-20 01:45:00.179169442 +0100
+++ b/vl.c	2015-11-20 01:44:22.181778840 +0100
@@ -1914,6 +1914,7 @@
 #endif
     do {
         nonblocking = !kvm_enabled() && !xen_enabled() && last_io > 0;
+        nonblocking = 0;
 #ifdef CONFIG_PROFILER
         ti = profile_getclock();
 #endif

For explanation of the nature of this issue, read this discussion.