Greetings, This may be a known problem but I can't find it anywhere... I have an Athlon64 loptop with a 3400+ in it (C0 stepping, I think). I just installed Suse 9.1 x86-64 after having run 9.0 x86-64 successfully for quite a while (after I hacked the Powernow driver to work, that is, sigh). After it booted up the first time, I noticed it seemed relatively sluggish. Turns out at some point in the boot sequence the load jumps up to about 8 and stays there at a minimum. The power management from default/install kernel from the distribution sees this as a large load and leaves the processor at high speed all the time. I tried updating the kernel to the newest one off the Suse FTP site, and the result is the same except that now Powernow support is broken again (I have a buggy BIOS, but this problem has been around for a while...). I can fix the Powernow issue and post a patch to this list easily enough, but I still need a fix for the huge idle load issue. Without it, Suse 9.1 is effectively nonfunctional for me. If I knew what was sucking up the CPU, then I could patch/hack it myself, but while "top" reports the CPU is 100% busy with 8-12 running Tasks, the list of processes in general seem idle, with perhaps a few kernel processes that seem slightly busy, but none are listed as using more than about 2.5% of the CPU. The number of interrupts are also relatively normal. Given what I'm seeing below, it kinda seems like ACPI (or some other event generator) is going crazy and reporting events constantly, and that's how the machine is being taken to it's knees. But with little Linux ACPI experience I'm not sure where the hooks are to look into this. If I don't hear anything from the list I'll probably fire up oprofile and do some code sniffing from there to see where it's actually spending it's time. FYI, Windows 64 (and -32) apparently work fine on this machine. Example "top" output: -------------------------------------------------------------------- Tasks: 75 total, 11 running, 62 sleeping, 0 stopped, 2 zombie Cpu(s): 67.9% us, 32.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 1028688k total, 309112k used, 719576k free, 23472k buffers Swap: 1048816k total, 0k used, 1048816k free, 117892k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 12466 root 16 0 166m 26m 144m S 1.9 2.6 0:03.77 X 3235 root 16 0 12232 1456 11m R 1.3 0.1 0:29.06 powersaved 4 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 1.0 0.0 0:26.65 kacpid 12094 eboleyn 16 0 3988 1124 3752 R 0.6 0.1 0:00.07 top 17261 root 5 -20 7868 1532 7512 S 0.6 0.1 0:00.02 powersave_proxy 17440 root 2 -20 0 0 0 Z 0.6 0.0 0:00.02 powersa <defunct> 17443 root 4 -20 0 0 0 Z 0.6 0.0 0:00.02 powersa <defunct> 1 root 16 0 640 264 492 S 0.0 0.0 0:06.11 init 2 root 34 19 0 0 0 R 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 ksoftirqd/0 3 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.26 events/0 5 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 kblockd/0 6 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper 7 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush 8 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 pdflush 10 root 7 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Current output of "/proc/cpuinfo" (Powernow is broken so it always says 800MHz, but the rest is normal): -------------------------------------------------------------------- processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 4 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3400+ stepping : 8 cpu MHz : 800.042 cache size : 1024 KB ... -------------------------------------------------------------------- Relevant "dmesg" output: -------------------------------------------------------------------- Bootdata ok (command line is root=/dev/hda1 vga=0x317 splash=silent desktop mem=1048512K) Linux version 2.6.5-7.95-default (geeko@buildhost) (gcc version 3.3.3 (SuSE Linux)) #1 Thu Jul 1 15:23:45 UTC 2004 BIOS-provided physical RAM map: BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable) BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved) BIOS-e820: 00000000000e0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved) BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 000000003fff0000 (usable) BIOS-e820: 000000003fff0000 - 000000003fffffc0 (ACPI data) BIOS-e820: 000000003fffffc0 - 0000000040000000 (ACPI NVS) BIOS-e820: 00000000fff80000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved) ... ACPI: RSDP (v000 OID_00 ) @ 0x00000000000e5010 ACPI: RSDT (v001 INSYDE RSDT_000 0x00000001 _CSI 0x00010101) @ 0x000000003fffcc40 ACPI: FADT (v001 INSYDE FACP_000 0x00000100 _CSI 0x00010101) @ 0x000000003ffffaa0 ACPI: BOOT (v001 INSYDE SYS_BOOT 0x00000100 _CSI 0x00010101) @ 0x000000003ffffb90 ACPI: DBGP (v001 INSYDE DBGP_000 0x00000100 _CSI 0x00010101) @ 0x000000003ffffbc0 ACPI: MADT (v001 INSYDE APIC_000 0x30303030 0000 0x30303030) @ 0x000000003ffffb30 ACPI: DSDT (v001 INSYDE K8T400 0x00001000 MSFT 0x0100000e) @ 0x0000000000000000 ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee00000 ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x00] lapic_id[0x00] enabled) Processor #0 15:4 APIC version 16 ACPI: LAPIC_NMI (acpi_id[0x00] high edge lint[0x1]) ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x01] address[0xfec00000] global_irq_base[0x0]) IOAPIC[0]: Assigned apic_id 1 IOAPIC[0]: apic_id 1, version 3, address 0xfec00000, GSI 0-23 ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 0 global_irq 2 dfl dfl) ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 9 global_irq 9 low level) ACPI: IRQ0 used by override. ACPI: IRQ2 used by override. ACPI: IRQ9 used by override. Using ACPI (MADT) for SMP configuration information ... ACPI: Subsystem revision 20040326 ACPI: Interpreter enabled ACPI: Using IOAPIC for interrupt routing ACPI: PCI Root Bridge [PCI0] (00:00) PCI: Probing PCI hardware (bus 00) ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0._PRT] ACPI: Embedded Controller [EC0] (gpe 5) ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKA] (IRQs 3 4 5 7 10 *11 14 15) ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKB] (IRQs 3 4 5 7 *10 11 14 15) ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKC] (IRQs 3 4 *5 7 10 11 14 15) ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKD] (IRQs 3 4 5 7 10 *11 14 15) ... ACPI: (supports S0 S3 S4 S5) ... ACPI: AC Adapter [AC] (on-line) ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT0] (battery present) ACPI: Power Button (FF) [PWRF] ACPI: Lid Switch [LID] ACPI: Sleep Button (CM) [SBTN] ACPI: Processor [CPU0] (supports C1 C2 C3) ACPI: Thermal Zone [TZ0] (44 C) powernow-k8: Found 1 AMD Athlon 64 / Opteron processors (version 1.00.09d) powernow-k8: BIOS error: numpst must be 1 -------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Erich Stefan Boleyn http://www.uruk.org/ "Reality is truly stranger than fiction; Probably why fiction is so popular"