On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 10:54:12AM -0700, Greg KH wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 12:32:08PM -0400, tmhikaru@gmail.com wrote:
> > 	I'm not exactly sure what's going on here and I'd like some help
> > figuring out what is. For some inexplicable reason, ever since I started
> > using the 2.6.35.x series with the 2.6.35.3 release, my loadaverages tend to
> > bounce anywhere from as low to .2 to 1.5 - constantly, while the machine
> > seems idle.
> 
> But .34 doesn't show this issue?
> 
> If so, can you run 'git bisect' between the .34 and .35 releases to find
> out where the problem comes in?

.34 does not, that is correct.
> 
> > Consistently, there are no programs in D state in ps aux output,
> > no cpu hogging programs running in top, nothing I can see that should
> > explain the bizzarely high load average.
> 
> Loadaverage can be affected by a driver doing an uninteruptable sleep.
> This doesn't actually cause a load on the system, but it does affect the
> way that number is calcuated.  Perhaps that's the problem here.
>

That would explain a lot.
> > 	If you have any tips or recommendations on what I should use to
> > investigate this further, please let me know. Once I have ensured to my own
> > satisfaction that I'm not doing something bizzare that's screwing up my
> > machine, I'll make a detailed bug report and start on figuring out how to
> > use git bisect.
> 
> 'man git-bisect' will help with this :)
> 
> thanks,
> 
> greg k-h

Thank you for the tips. If I don't find anything obvious I'll bisect it very
soon, but I'll likely attempt to track backwards from .3 myself since I've
backtracked through patches before. Once I have narrowed it down to a patch
release it'll likely take less time to bisect. (eg, if I know it happened
between 2.6.35-rc1 and rc2 I'd only have to bisect the patches between those
versions, whereas right now I only know positively between 2.6.34 and
2.6.35.3 something went wrong.)

Tim McGrath