On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:20:53 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote > On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 4:52 PM, listmail <listmail at 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... > > 1. 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