linux-kernel - Strange load average and ksoftirqd behavior with 2.6.29-rc2-git1

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Date:	Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:25:37 +0100
From:	Damien Wyart <damien.wyart@...e.fr>
To:	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Strange load average and ksoftirqd behavior with 2.6.29-rc2-git1

Hello,

Testing 2.6.29-rc2-git1, I notice something which doesn't happen with
2.6.28.1 on the same machine with the same config (minus new config
entries for 2.6.29) : when the machine is idle, the load average
reported by top is not 0.00 (it is with 2.6.28.1) but between 0.30 and
0.80 and either ksoftirqd/0 or ksoftirqd/1 is listed as number one in
top output, with a few % of CPU. The machine seems to work fine but
I think something is still wrong.

Here is an example of top output :

top - 17:23:40 up 19 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.42, 0.48, 0.34
Tasks:  99 total,   1 running,  98 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.2%us,  0.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.1%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem:   2075420k total,   311920k used,  1763500k free,     4912k buffers
Swap:  1212896k total,        0k used,  1212896k free,   115648k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
    4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    1  0.0   0:30.74 ksoftirqd/0
    1 root      20   0  2100  692  588 S    0  0.0   0:00.47 init

I attach dmesg, config and /proc/interrupts. Feel free to ask more info
if needed.

Best,

-- 
Damien Wyart

View attachment "dmesg" of type "text/plain" (22511 bytes)

View attachment "config" of type "text/plain" (42483 bytes)

View attachment "interrupts" of type "text/plain" (1232 bytes)