About KIPMI0 process

[Chris - PowerEdge Linux List]

----- 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:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thu May 24 17:04:02 PDT 2007
top - 17:04:03 up 1 day, 22:08,  2 users,  load average: 0.60, 0.23, 0.08
Tasks:  59 total,   1 running,  58 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu0  :  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 100.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% 
si
Cpu1  :  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 100.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% 
si
Cpu2  :  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 100.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% 
si
Cpu3  :  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 100.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% 
si
Mem:   4149240k total,   336916k used,  3812324k free,    46620k buffers
Swap:  4192956k total,        0k used,  4192956k free,   231060k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
    1 root      15   0  3536  548  472 S    0  0.0   0:00.63 init
    2 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.02 migration/0
    3 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
    4 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 migration/1
    5 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/1
    6 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.02 migration/2
    7 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/2
    8 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 migration/3
    9 root      34  19     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/3
   10 root       5 -10     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 events/0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The 2nd user is me - one SSH session running 'top', second session me 
grabbing data from the log.  Nothing else is running.  'init' seems to stay 
at the top of the 'top' list, and someone for no reason whatsoever the load 
goes from 0.00 to around 0.5 to 0.6 for about 20-40 seconds, then drops back 
down to 0.00.  I don't see any other processes running when the load spikes 
to ~0.60, and as you can see from the 'top' list above, there's nothing in 
the %CPU column either, which is the part that is driving me nuts. 
SOMETHING is causing the CPU load to spike, but not a single process is 
showing in 'top' as using anything but 0% CPU.

Any ideas what else I can try or how else to troubleshoot this to figure out 
what on earth might be causing this?  I really don't see any "processes" 
using CPU resources when this load issue occurs.

Chris