[CentOS] CentOS 4.4-IBM Netvista Performace Problems, help needed.

[Chuck Mattern]

I now have both servers booting with no apic and no acpi and keeping 
perfect time (with ntp running, without there was a minor drift of a 
couple of seconds over the course of a day).  What is the down side to 
running this way?  I noticed that certain interrupts are handled 
differently.  One of my co-workers got the impression that this is part 
of a hardware abstraction layer that could lead to virtualization 
opportunities.  Any idea what the purpose of moving interrupts (in my 
case for network cards and USB) to virtual interrupts is?  sample below:

[root at remus ~]# cat /proc/interrupts
          CPU0       0:   36662232    IO-APIC-edge  timer
 1:          9    IO-APIC-edge  i8042
 8:         26    IO-APIC-edge  rtc
 9:          0   IO-APIC-level  acpi
12:         67    IO-APIC-edge  i8042
14:      22214    IO-APIC-edge  ide0
15:     329561    IO-APIC-edge  ide1
177:          0   IO-APIC-level  uhci_hcd
185:        218   IO-APIC-level  uhci_hcd
193:          0   IO-APIC-level  uhci_hcd
201:          2   IO-APIC-level  ehci_hcd
217:      26007   IO-APIC-level  eth0, eth1
225:    1030795   IO-APIC-level  eth2
NMI:          0
LOC:   36663881
ERR:          0
MIS:          0

Regards,
Chuck

Chuck Mattern wrote:
> First a grateful thank you to the individuals who posted responses and 
> an apology for not turning around faster.  My day job is plagued with 
> a project that distinctly resembles the maiden voyage of HMS Titanic 
> and has been getting the best of me.
> I'm trying the later fixes suggested in the bugzilla entry pointed to 
> by Zoran below (booting with " noapic noacpi apic=off acpi=off").  
> Interestingly I had noted several of the issues covered in the 
> responses, different irq handling, ide disk involvement (the onset of 
> time problems seems to be hastened by high disk io).  I'll report back 
> on the results.
>
> Regards,
> Chuck
>
> Zoran Milojevic wrote:
>> On 2/18/07, Chuck Mattern <camattern at acm.org> wrote:
>>> -Systems will bog down critically after approximately 24 hours loosing
>>> system time at an increasing rate,
>>
>> We have several IBM boxes (NetVista mostly) @work that would exhibit
>> similar behavior - run normally at first, then after a few hours the
>> system clock practically stops; I measured 2 minutes of wall-clock
>> time for a "sleep 1" to return, and up to 20 seconds for "usleep 1"...
>> Tried updating BIOS, kernel (4.3, 4.4, updates), some combinations of
>> boot time parameters (as in: clock={pit|pmtmr|..}, noapic, acpi=off
>> and the like), without improvement. We just gave up on those due to
>> the lack of time.
>>
>> See also: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=203818
>> Solution from comment 18 may help (that comment was submitted after
>> we've given up, not sure if it was tried).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Zoran
>
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