From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932331Ab1CaDJ1 (ORCPT ); Wed, 30 Mar 2011 23:09:27 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:24866 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755362Ab1CaDJZ (ORCPT ); Wed, 30 Mar 2011 23:09:25 -0400 Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2011 23:09:18 -0400 From: Dave Jones To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Andrew Morton , Linux Kernel Subject: excessive kworker activity when idle. (was Re: vma corruption in today's -git) Message-ID: <20110331030917.GB26057@redhat.com> Mail-Followup-To: Dave Jones , Linus Torvalds , Andrew Morton , Linux Kernel References: <20110329040939.GA32764@redhat.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 09:22:25PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 9:09 PM, Dave Jones wrote: > > > > I ran perf top, and got this .. > > > >  BUG: unable to handle kernel paging request at fffffffffffffff3 > > Should be fixed by commit 76597cd31470. > > Except that was already committed yesterday. When did you pull? It did fix it, I must have missed that commit. But rerunning the same tests on current head (6aba74f2791287ec407e0f92487a725a25908067) I can still reproduce the problem where kworker threads go nutso when the machine should be completely idle. top shows two kworker threads constantly at >80% cpu. I can now profile it with perf though, so I'll dig deeper. I need to try a build with slab debug etc turned off, just to be sure that isn't throwing things into a spin. Dave