listmail wrote: > On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:48:55 -0700, I wrote >> I am running CentOS 5 on a dual-dual-core Intel machine, and I am seeing >> a load average of between 0.35 and 0.50 while the machine is idle, i.e. >> no processes appear to be running. >> >> Both top and uptime report the same thing. Looking at top, I cannot >> see any processes that are using CPU time except for top and init, >> and they are not using enough cycles to push up the load average. >> >> According to top, there are occasional tiny (like 0.5%) bumps in the >> system usage occasionally, and almost no user space usage. Again, not >> enough to account for the load average I am seeing. >> >> I have tried a couple of kernel updates, and upgraded from CentOS >> 5.0 to 5.2, none of which make any difference. >> >> Has anyone else seen this? And can anyone recommend a way to figure out >> what is causing the load average to be this high when the machine is >> idle? >> > A follow-up now that this issue is resolved. Thanks to the help of some > kind souls on this list, I was able to determine that the problem was only > manifested when the Ethernet drivers were running. This led me to update > the drivers, which solved the problem. > > Details for others who will probably encounter this issue: > > 1. The problem occurs with the 2.6.18-92.1.6.el5 kernels that come with > CentOS 5.2, and the supplied Intel e1000e Ethernet drivers v0.2.0 that > ship with 5.2. > > 2. The fix is to update the e1000e drivers, which are available from the > Intel web site. I installed e1000e version 0.4.1.7-NAPI. Instructions > for installation come with the driver; the package I found was > e1000e-0.4.1.7.tar.gz > > 3. You have to compile the drivers from source. They require the kernel-devel > package to be installed in order to compile, of course. But if you are > running the PAE kernel, you need to install kernel-PAE-devel to compile > against. News to me, the naming convention makes it hard to figure out > which name you need until you browse the available kernel packages. Simply > doing yum install kernel-devel does not get you what you need. > > I hope this saves someone else the time I wasted figuring this out. :-) I think I am going to file this as a bug on the RH site to inform them of this issue so that they can choose to upgrade their driver if they want. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 251 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20080802/536f50a6/attachment-0005.sig>