funny kernel death with ksoftirqd_CPUX taking up almost 100% of cpu?

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt]

>
>I just experienced an alarming form of kernel death running a self compiled
>SMP kernel with HIGHMEM enabled on my dual G4 -1gig machine.
>
>The kernel tree used is Ben's 2.4.19-pre10 one rebuilt for SMP support, aec
>IDE driver and otherwise basically stock.
>
>I was debugging in gdb a large program and noticed typing got slower and
>slower.  I quick check of top showed that ksoftirqd_CPU was taking up
>almost 100% of the cpu.  I exited out of gdb and killed every process I
>could think of but the usage of that kernel demaon stayed at near 100%.

BTW. It would be interesting to know if you can ever reproduce it...

Ben.


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