[CentOS] Load Average ~0.40 when idle

[William Warren]

post it on the centos bug tracker to start..:)

listmail wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 21:56:45 -0700, John R Pierce wrote
>> Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>>> On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 2:48 PM, listmail <listmail at entertech.com> 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.
>>> Download the livecd and boot using it. See if the load average still
>>> occurs. Check to see if you have any traffic occuring on the network
>>> from the system. [I had a box that was kernel trojaned that had a load
>>> average all the time when it was on the wire and did not when it
>>> didn't. The kernel trojan was looking for a particular bit of traffic
>>> that would open up its backdoor to.]
>>>
>> its been ages since i've had to do this, but in years past, rkhunter 
>> was really good at finding rootkits like this.   worst case, you put 
>> it on alive CD and run it from there.
>>
> 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.
> 
> In my mind, that pretty much eliminates the possibility of a rootkit, unless
> one was delivered with the Live CD. :-)  So it looks like this is a bug
> in either the Intel GLAN driver, or some other kernel timing issue. If anyone
> can suggest where this bug should be reported and is likely to be addressed,
> please let me know. I don't know myself who would be the correct party to
> notify.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who responded and helped me track this one down. I'm not
> sure if should roll back to CentOS 5.0, or just try to live with this bug
> until the maintainers address it, but at least I have some idea of what's
> wrong.
> 
> Thanks,
> --Bill
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