Date: Fri, 31 May 2013 08:36:02 -0400 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Cc: Kostas Oikonomou <k.oikonomou@att.net> Subject: Re: idle process keeping cpu 150% busy in freebsd 9.1-amd64 Message-ID: <201305310836.02815.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <51A7B693.8050705@att.net> References: <51A7B693.8050705@att.net>
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On Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:29:07 pm Kostas Oikonomou wrote: > Hello, > I am new to FreeBSD. I just installed 9.1-RELEASE-p3 (comes with PC-BSD > 9.1) on an HP Pavilion s5100z. The machine has a dual-core AMD Athlon > 7750 processor. > What happens is that when I am doing nothing on the machine, one core > is about 150% > busy running the idle process: > USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME > COMMAND > root 11 152.9 0.0 0 32 ?? RL 8:19AM 2:14.50 [idle] > root 0 0.0 0.1 0 2672 ?? DLs 8:19AM 0:00.36 > [kernel] > root 1 0.0 0.0 6276 416 ?? SLs 8:19AM 0:00.05 > /sbin/init -- > I have read [1]http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=38757, which > seems to be relevant, and I tried > sysctl -w kern.eventtimer.timer=<various choices> > as they suggest, but to no avail. > The same problem also on my Dell E6510 laptop, which has an Intel Core > i7: the idle process is making one core run at about 400%. > Any help would be greatly appreciated. > Kostas This is normal. The idle process has a thread per-CPU that the scheduler runs when the CPU is idle. Even if the CPU is actually asleep in a Cx state, the time it is asleep is accounted to the idle thread. I added a 'Z' flag to hide the idle threads in top (they are especially noisy on an idle machine with a lot of CPUs if you use top -SH). -- John Baldwin
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