Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758313Ab1CaP0f (ORCPT ); Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:26:35 -0400 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:41713 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1758261Ab1CaP0e (ORCPT ); Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:26:34 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20110331150344.GB10163@redhat.com> References: <20110329040939.GA32764@redhat.com> <20110331030917.GB26057@redhat.com> <20110331035511.GA1255@redhat.com> <20110331145850.GA10163@redhat.com> <20110331150344.GB10163@redhat.com> From: Linus Torvalds Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:25:36 -0700 Message-ID: Subject: Re: excessive kworker activity when idle. (was Re: vma corruption in today's -git) To: Dave Jones , Linus Torvalds , Andrew Morton , Linux Kernel , Tejun Heo Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 974 Lines: 23 On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 8:03 AM, Dave Jones wrote: > On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 10:58:50AM -0400, Dave Jones wrote: > > bah I missed a level. which seems to be the smoking gun. > something in the tty layer seems to have gone nuts. Ahhah. That is indeed the smoking gun. I bet it's an old problem where something causes some stupid tty ping-pong behaviour, and now it has become a high-CPU thing triggered by commit f23eb2b2b285 ("tty: stop using "delayed_work" in the tty layer"). Before that commit, if the tty layer got somehow confused, it would always delay for a timer tick in between doing nothing. Now it will go pretty much full blast. Which explains your CPU being hot. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/