AMD64 X2 lost ticks on PM timer

bubshait
2006-02-27T21:24:59Z

I have been suffering from lost ticks for several months now ever since I
switched to an X86_64 kernel with SMP. I have read previous posts about lost
ticks due to TSC timer, but I have been having a different problem as I have
only been using 2.6.14 and then 2.6.15 kernels and only PM timers. Also, this
problem does not manifest itself immedietly, I could be using the system for
anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days without any problems before I
start losing ticks, but once it starts it would lose them constantly and my
desktop becomes unstable (some apps crash, while other take 5 minutes to
start up, this was what led me to discover the lost ticks) forcing me to
reboot. The following error appears in dmesg at the time the system starts to
act strange

Losing some ticks... checking if CPU frequency changed.
warning: many lost ticks.
Your time source seems to be instable or some driver is hogging interupts
rip __do_softirq+0x47/0xd1

adding report_lost_ticks only prints repeating messages like

Lost 3 timer tick(s)! rip __do_softirq+0x47/0xd1

I have tried using acipmaintimer and acippmtimer, it would boot fine but I
would notice the following in dmesg

..MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
timer doesn't work through the IO-APIC - disabling NMI Watchdog!
Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 3d.

And would still end up with lost ticks eventually. using acpi=off causes the
entire system to come to a crawl (I am guessing this is due to the PM timer).
For the life of me I can't seem to figure out what causes these lost ticks to
start, but when they do the /proc/interrupts show a drop from roughly 1000
interrupts/sec to around 700 and this persists until I reboot.

My hardware is an AMD64 X2 4800+ on an asus A8N-SLI.

Also, could I please be CC'ed to any replies. I don't mean to be rude by not
subscribing but I couldn't handle the volume.

Thanks,
Abdulla Bubshait