Runaway intr, not flash related

[Andriy Gapon]

on 12/08/2010 23:57 Doug Barton said the following:
> My "runaway intr" problem with flash has been continuing all along, but
> since no one has been interested in helping with it I haven't reported
> it for a while. However, today, for the first time, it happened when I
> had not run flash at all since I booted.
> 
> My system:
> Dell D620, C2D, i386, SMP, r210908
> 
> swi4: clock is the culprit again this time, but when flash triggers this
> problem I sometimes see hdac as the culprit, FYI.
> 
> 
> last pid: 19763;  load averages:  1.05,  1.40,  1.18    up 0+01:58:20 
> 13:41:19
> 129 processes: 3 running, 106 sleeping, 20 waiting
> CPU 0: 20.8% user,  0.0% nice,  6.9% system,  8.5% interrupt, 63.8% idle
> CPU 1: 56.9% user,  0.0% nice,  8.5% system,  1.5% interrupt, 33.1% idle
> Mem: 182M Active, 1279M Inact, 187M Wired, 18M Cache, 112M Buf, 334M Free
> Swap: 1024M Total, 1024M Free
> 
>   PID USERNAME   PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
>    10 root       171 ki31     0K    16K RUN     1  87:55 63.72% {idle:
> cpu1}
>    10 root       171 ki31     0K    16K RUN     0  88:03 60.69% {idle:
> cpu0}
>  1621 dougb      102    0   162M   141M select  0  14:19 29.54% Xorg
>    11 root       -32    -     0K   160K WAIT    0   0:33  5.76% {swi4:
> clock}
>  1668 dougb       97    0 36808K 20864K select  0   0:38  3.61% {initial
> thread
>  1692 dougb        8    0 11136K  2284K nanslp  0   2:13  2.15% wmwlmon
> 19763 dougb       96    0  9912K  2076K CPU1    1   0:01  1.57% top
>    17 root        96    -     0K     8K syncer  1   0:48  1.17% syncer
>  1684 dougb       96    0 11020K  2108K select  1   1:10  1.12% wmbsdbatt
>  1762 dougb       96    0 36284K 15540K select  0   0:04  0.39% {initial
> thread
>    11 root       -64    -     0K   160K WAIT    0   0:03  0.15% {irq22:
> uhci2}
>   783 root        96    0  9684K  1232K select  0   0:21  0.10% moused
>  1663 dougb       96    0 21388K  8912K select  1   0:15  0.10% openbox
>    11 root       -32    -     0K   160K WAIT    1   0:17  0.05% {swi4:
> clock}
>  1817 dougb       96    0 90820K 53672K select  0   3:23  0.00% {initial
> thread
>     0 root       -16    0     0K    64K sched   0   0:26  0.00% {swapper}

I am sorry, but I don't see anything dramatically wrong here.
So "swi4: clock" uses 5.76% of WCPU, is that such a big deal to be called "runaway
intr"?
A lot of CPU time is idle and a lot is used by userland processes (e.g. Xorg).
Can you provide data that better illustrate your problem?

-- 
Andriy Gapon