Date: Fri, 31 May 2013 10:47:34 -0400 From: Kostas Oikonomou <k.oikonomou@att.net> To: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-amd64@freebsd.org Subject: Re: idle process keeping cpu 150% busy in freebsd 9.1-amd64 Message-ID: <51A8B806.5090100@att.net> In-Reply-To: <201305310836.02815.jhb@freebsd.org> References: <51A7B693.8050705@att.net> <201305310836.02815.jhb@freebsd.org>
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Thanks very much for the reply.
Being new to FreeBSD, this still seems weird to me. (My
background is Solaris.)
On both machines, the core that's running at 150% in the
case of the HP machine, and at 400% in the case
of the Dell laptop, is causing the fans to come on. Would
you call that "idle"? I'm worried that the cores will
eventually be damaged.
Kostas
On 05/31/13 08:36 AM, John Baldwin wrote:
> 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).
>
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