what is ksoftirqd/0 and how to stop it.?

[dmt]

Hi all

Basically I installed the lxde edition on my laptop and all seems well.  I then went ahead and installed onto the desktop.  It all seems well apart from a process - ksoftirqd/0 - hogging the cpu and heating up the machine.  I have found no way to stop it - unlike stopping the automatic apt-get update checking on loging-in.  How is it stopped.  I have tried updating/changing the kernel as sugessted in some forums - that did not help.

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00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 761/M761 Host (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge
00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS965 [MuTIOL Media IO] (rev 48)
00:02.5 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev 01)
00:02.7 Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] AC'97 Sound Controller (rev a0)
00:03.0 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.1 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.2 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 1.1 Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] USB 2.0 Controller
00:06.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge
00:07.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] PCI-to-PCI bridge
00:08.0 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] Device 0183 (rev 01)
00:09.0 Multimedia controller: Philips Semiconductors SAA7131/SAA7133/SAA7135 Video Broadcast Decoder (rev d0)
00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: ADMtek NC100 Network Everywhere Fast Ethernet 10/100 (rev 11)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV610 video device [Radeon HD 2400 PRO]
01:00.1 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc RV610 audio device [Radeon HD 2400 PRO]

Thats my lspci.

Any ideas anyone

[Just17]

Two responses I came across on line

Your computer communicates with the devices attached to it through IRQs (interrupt requests). When an interrupt comes from a device, the operating system pauses what it was doing and starts addressing that interrupt.

In some situations IRQs come very very fast one after the other and the operating system cannot finish servicing one before another one arrives. This can happen when a high speed network card receives a very large number of packets in a short time frame.

Because the operating system cannot handle IRQs as they arrive (because they arrive too fast one after the other), the operating system queues them for later processing by a special internal process named ksoftirqd.

If ksoftirqd is taking more than a tiny percentage of CPU time, this indicates the machine is under heavy interrupt load.

Sounds like you have some bad hardware that is generating interrupts non stop. Take a look at /proc/interrupts and see if you can spot the one that is going nuts. –

Makes me wonder if it is connected to the SIS hardware .......

[dmt]

Quote
Sounds like you have some bad hardware that is generating interrupts non stop. Take a look at /proc/interrupts and see if you can spot the one that is going nuts. –

Yeah I had a look yesterday.  Something to do with Local timer interrupts.

Makes me wonder if it is connected to the SIS hardware .......

I doubt that as pclinuxos is the only os that has done this - more likely pclinuxos bug.

[menotu]

I doubt that as pclinuxos is the only os that has done this - more likely pclinuxos bug.

From the web searches I quickly did it seems the ksoftirqd/0 is not restricted to PCLinuxsOS and in fact it seems fairly widespread.

[dmt]

I doubt that as pclinuxos is the only os that has done this - more likely pclinuxos bug.

From the web searches I quickly did it seems the ksoftirqd/0 is not restricted to PCLinuxsOS and in fact it seems fairly widespread.

Thats true.  But it is only with pclinuxos that it is a problem - at least on my desktop.

[7272andy]

Just had a quick look at my machine (Bare Metal 2), and found I have ksoftirqd/0 to ksoftirqd/3 running, but taking no resources I can see in the activity monitor.

I'm wondering if these processes relate to the active cores.

Regards

[dmt]

Hi all

I have had a look at my laptop and /proc/irq have folders that are numbered that are not empty like on my desktop.  I can only guess that the install was not clean.  I will copy across most of the folders from my laptop.