Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2015 05:43:51 +0200 From: Alexander Motin <mav@FreeBSD.org> To: Ian Smith <smithi@nimnet.asn.au>, Tom Evans <tevans.uk@googlemail.com> Cc: FreeBSD Stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>, Jeremy Chadwick <jdc@koitsu.org>, Miroslav Lachman <000.fbsd@quip.cz> Subject: Re: stable/10: high load average when box is idle Message-ID: <567F5E77.5060206@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <20151106212735.U12989@sola.nimnet.asn.au> References: <20151027050508.GA7612@icarus.home.lan> <20151104025748.F10372@sola.nimnet.asn.au> <CAFHbX1%2BQT5E=wgDQ5SsCLZgVWeGxody_dVucbmMgdBNtukZEsQ@mail.gmail.com> <20151106212735.U12989@sola.nimnet.asn.au>
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On 26.12.2015 17:09, Ian Smith wrote: > Current hypothesis: some variable/s are getting improperly initialised > at boot, but are (somehow?) getting properly re-initialised on changing > cpuset to 1 then back to 2 cpus - though I've no idea how, or by what. While this is interesting hypothesis, I see no real ground for it in the code. My own explanation here, same as before, is in area of events aliasing. HPET, due to its hardware limitations, more prone to different synchronization effects then LAPIC. And those limitations are specific to hardware configuration. On modern hardware HPET may provide (up 8) per-CPU MSI interrupts. This is the best case for everything with minimal chances for aliasing (unless you have more then 8 logical cores). On older hardware it is typical to have HPET sharing single interrupt line with some other device(s) and generating events for all CPUs from it. Interrupt line sharing tends to create load of 1.0 due to counting its own interrupt thread. I've partially workarounded that at some point, but aliasing possibilities are still there. Driving multiple CPUs from the same interrupt also creates aliasing, since different CPUs wakeup close to each other and may count each-others load. Different CPU wakeup times from different sleep states and other sources of jitter may generate quite complicated but not really useful behavior patterns. Happy holidays! -- Alexander Motin
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