Re: 2.6.33 & 2.6.34-rc6: Huge number of Load Balancing tick wakeups.

From: Nigel Cunningham
Date: Sat May 08 2010 - 19:28:57 EST


Hi Len.

On 09/05/10 05:16, Len Brown wrote:
(linux-pm cc'd)

I'm seeing a huge number of load balancing tick wakeups, with both 2.6.33 and
current git (f1c448e0a9e99c76f4ece368714fb35a40a8daba).

This has been reported as a bug in some distros:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=521944
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/524281

Unclear if your sighting is the same as those two.

What do you see if vmware is not present?

I still see a huge number, just not as huge. The number of load balancing ticks seems to increase with the number of ticks from other sources. Without vmware running I got:

Cn Avg residency
C0 (cpu running) (14.5%)
polling 0.2ms ( 0.0%)
C1 mwait 0.0ms ( 0.0%)
C2 mwait 0.1ms ( 1.7%)
C4 mwait 1.1ms (83.8%)
P-states (frequencies)
Turbo Mode 1.2%
2.21 Ghz 0.0%
1.60 Ghz 0.0%
1200 Mhz 0.1%
800 Mhz 98.7%
Wakeups-from-idle per second : 907.4 interval: 15.0s
no ACPI power usage estimate available
Top causes for wakeups:
42.1% (435.6) [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
21.2% (219.6) [extra timer interrupt]
10.2% (105.6) plugin-containe
9.5% ( 98.1) pulseaudio
1.7% ( 17.9) [Rescheduling interrupts] <kernel IPI>
1.7% ( 17.1) [iwl3945] <interrupt>
1.4% ( 14.8) [kernel core] hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
1.4% ( 14.3) [ata_piix] <interrupt>

What do you see if you boot single user mode,
how about with maxcpusx=1?

I'll try those later today and get back to you with more info.

Regards,

Nigel

cheers,
Len Brown, Intel Open Source Technology Center

PowerTOP 1.12 (C) 2007, 2008 Intel Corporation

Collecting data for 15 seconds


Your CPU supports the following C-states : C1 C2 C3 C4
Your BIOS reports the following C-states : C1 C2 C4
Cn Avg residency
C0 (cpu running) (40.8%)
polling 0.7ms ( 0.1%)
C1 mwait 0.0ms ( 0.0%)
C2 mwait 0.1ms ( 3.2%)
C4 mwait 0.4ms (56.0%)
P-states (frequencies)
Turbo Mode 7.3%
2.21 Ghz 0.7%
1.60 Ghz 0.8%
1200 Mhz 0.9%
800 Mhz 90.3%
Wakeups-from-idle per second : 1727.3 interval: 15.0s
no ACPI power usage estimate available
Top causes for wakeups:
53.0% (1983.1) [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
27.7% (1035.1) vmware-vmx
8.8% (330.6) [extra timer interrupt]
2.3% ( 85.5) [TLB shootdowns]<kernel IPI>
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/