About KIPMI0 process

[Kuba Ober]

On Friday 25 May 2007, Chris - PowerEdge Linux List wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michael E Brown" <Michael_E_Brown at dell.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 3:56 PM
> Subject: Re: About KIPMI0 process
>
> >> What do we have to do to turn all this stuff completely off to bring the
> >> CPU
> >> load down to 0.00 when it's not running anything at all?  I'm open to
> >> any and all suggestions at this point.  We've resisted putting this
> >> server into
> >> production.  I know this is considered "harmless" load by Dell, but it
> >> really messes up our monitoring systems and alters the true CPU load
> >> that we
> >> monitor for best application processing.  There's no reason we should be
> >> seeing anything but 0.00 on a system that has nothing installed and
> >> nothing
> >> running on it.
> >
> > You sure it isnt some random system daemon? You havent provided any data
> > to show what is causing the cpu load.
>
> That's the problem.  I disabled virtually all daemons that get installed
> with 'RHEL4 minimal install' and I've been watching 'top' and even have a
> script running that constantly checks the load and if it exceeds 0.40 it
> loggs the top 20 processes once a second, and NOTHING is showing...  I just
> spent the last 15 minutes staring non-stop at 'top' and here's what the
> results look like, when the load suddenly spikes at 0.60:

Methinks that what you want is the user+system CPU percentage, not the load 
value. Try this:

$ sar -u 2
Linux 2.6.20-1.2948.fc6 (locahost)       06/07/2007

04:45:44 PM       
CPU     %user     %nice   %system   %iowait    %steal     %idle
04:45:46 PM       all      2.49      0.00      0.50      0.00      0.00     
97.01
Average:          all      2.49      0.00      0.50      0.00      0.00     
97.01

$sar -u 2 | awk '{last=$3 + $5}; END {print last}'
1.01

So, 1% utilization.

Cheers, Kuba