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Date:      Sun, 26 Jan 2003 16:17:13 +0800
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@freebsd.org>
To:        Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
Cc:        nate <freebsd@aphroland.org>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE in VMware
Message-ID:  <20030126081713.GF1606@sydney.worldwide.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <20030126013639.GA16435@rot13.obsecurity.org>
References:  <000901c2c469$8c9e4cf0$0a00a8c0@michaelslaptop> <38719.10.10.10.7.1043538258.squirrel@webmail.linuxpowered.net> <20030126013639.GA16435@rot13.obsecurity.org>

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On Saturday, 25 January 2003 at 17:36:39 -0800, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 25, 2003 at 03:44:18PM -0800, nate wrote:
>> Michael Ritchie said:
>>> Not sure if this should be in -QUESTIONS or a report to VMware themselves,
>>> but when attempting to run FreeBSD 5 within VMware Workstation 3.2 on a
>>> Windows XP Pro host, the CPU usage sits at 100% -- whether there are any
>>> processes undertaking heavy processing or not.  The host PC is a 1.7GHz
>>> P4, with 512MB RAM, so there shouldn't be any problems.  It takes about 2
>>> minutes for 'man man' to bring up a page.  4.6.2 and 4.7 both work GREAT,
>>> even in X.
>>>
>>> Any thoughts on why this might be the case??
>>
>> this is symtomatic of the guest OS(freebsd in this case) not having
>> advanced power management features enabled.
>
> No, it's symptomatic of VMWARE emulating a certain CPU opcode (used in
> FreeBSD 5.0 for locking primitives) very inefficiently.  See my
> previous response.

Until proof of the contrary, I'd assume its because FreeBSD 5.0 has an
idle process to use up the rest of the CPU time.  This is a feature,
not a bug :-)  Here's my laptop:

 last pid:  1919;  load averages:  0.01,  0.02,  0.00  up 0+02:06:58  16:14:52
 100 processes: 2 running, 87 sleeping, 11 waiting
 CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.8% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.2% idle
 Mem: 78M Active, 14M Inact, 17M Wired, 4636K Cache, 22M Buf, 6328K Free
 Swap: 512M Total, 5924K Used, 506M Free, 1% Inuse
 
   PID USERNAME  PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
    11 root      -16    0     0K    12K RUN    124:14 97.56% 97.56% idle
   740 grog       96    0 45904K 44356K select   0:34  0.00%  0.00% XFree86
   962 grog       96    0 12356K  9920K select   0:23  0.00%  0.00% emacs

Note that the system is 99% idle, but the idle process is using 97% of
CPU time.  The discrepancy is due to different ways of smoothing in
the usage calculations.  You'll note that the idle process' CPU time
is pretty close to the uptime.

Greg
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