On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:20:53 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote
On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 4:52 PM, listmail listmail@entertech.com wrote:
<snip
OK, I downloaded the CentOS 5.2 Live CD and booted from it. To eliminate load from the GUI, I forced the system into runlevel 3 and ran top. I see the same problem; the load average sits at about 0.40 continuously. This is with the ethernet drivers running, and it does not matter if the network cables are plugged in or not.
Ok sorry for the wild goose chase earlier...
- Check with the manufacturer or motherboard to see if this is a
known issue. Sometimes these items show up and are fixed with a BIOS update. 2. Check to see if you can pinpoint where the problem is coming from... set up sar and iostat to see if there are excessive irq's on one line or another. Run the system as a minimal OS when doing this... nothing but init 1 if possible. 3. Try Fedora 9 livecd and see if it still occurs. If it doesn't then the problem was fixed in the main kernel between EL-5 and now. That can help make it easier to track down for a bug in Red Hat's bugzilla.
I cannot find relevant support notes on either the Supermicro or Intel sites, but I'll send an email to Supermicro support to see if they know anything.
I used vmstat to compare interrupt and context switch rates on a system with the issue and a system without the issue (older kernel). Both systems show an irq rate of about 1000/sec and cs rate of about 25/sec.
The system that does not exhibit the problem is running 2.6.18-53.1.14.el5, so it seems to be something that has changed since that time frame (early CentOS 5.1, I think).
Thanks, --Bill