[OpenIndiana-discuss] System becoming unresponsive

[Chris Ridd]

On 12 Jan 2012, at 00:02, Matt Connolly wrote:

> Hi, my OI machine that I built recently has become unresponsive a number of times, requiring a hard reset.
> 
> Today this happened when I had an ssh connection open, running "top". This is the last screen I saw before all my ssh connections died and the machine stopped responding to all network activity.
> 
> load averages:  28.4,  11.5,  6.70;               up 3+00:50:14                                                           09:33:34
> 151 processes: 135 sleeping, 13 running, 3 on cpu
> CPU states:  0.1% idle,  3.6% user, 96.3% kernel,  0.0% iowait,  0.0% swap
> Kernel: 319 ctxsw, 15 trap, 517572 intr, 334874 syscall
> Memory: 16G phys mem, 2054M free mem, 8054M total swap, 8054M free swap
> 
>   PID USERNAME NLWP PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE    TIME    CPU COMMAND
>  1063 matt        8  59    0 1066M 1054M cpu/5  221:45 43.67% qemu-kvm-system
>  4557 matt        7  59    0 2094M 2082M cpu/2    1:09  7.50% qemu-kvm-system
>  1062 matt        8  59    0 1077M 1065M run    375:51  0.06% qemu-kvm-system
> ---snip---
> 
> (full page at https://gist.github.com/1597508 )
> 
> (The system is an Intel S1200-BTL motherboard with Xeon E3 processor and 16GB ECC ram.)
> 
> 
> Once unresponsive, every now and then the HD activity led blinks.
> 
> Under normal circumstances, the load average is in the 1-4 range. The machine is still under fairly light use until I get some more confidence in it.
> 
> After giving the machine a hard reset, I don't see anything in the fault log or in /var/adm/messages indicating a failure or anything unusual. (kvm is a bit noisy, but it's like that all the time, so I'm not sure that that could be cause for lock up after 5 days).
> 
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> What could be causing so much cpu usage in the kernel?

<https://www.illumos.org/issues/1333> may be worth a look if you can see ACPI (?) related messages in messages. The workaround in there (set apix:apic_timer_preferred_mode = 0x0) worked for my box.

Chris