Hi Gareth, Did you try to disable the console screensaver? Sometimes this helps.
Message: 1 Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 13:17:32 +0100 From: Gareth McCaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: "swiN: clock sio" process taking 75% CPU To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" (I've asked this question on -questions and -stable, with no success; hence I'm taking it to the assembled wizardry of -hackers. A bit of googling suggests that I'm far from the first person to have had a similar problem, though it seems to be worse for me than for the others I've found.) I have a box running 6-STABLE, cvsupped last week. Until recently it was running 5.something and showed the same peculiar behaviour as I'm about to describe. Further back, it used to run 4.x, and I don't recall anything like this happening then. About 6 minutes after booting (on three occasions, but I don't guarantee this doesn't vary), a process (well, a kernel interrupt thread, I guess) that appears in the output of "ps" as "[swi4: clock sio]" begins to use about 3/4 of the machine's CPU. I think it does so more or less instantaneously. It continues to do so indefinitely, so far as I can tell. I'm not aware of anything specific that triggers this, though I suppose there must *be* something. It happens apparently spontaneously, on a lightly loaded machine. Those cycles are genuinely being consumed; other processes run much more slowly than they "should", and take much more wall time than CPU time. I've tried diddling my kernel's HZ value; the behaviour with HZ=100 and with HZ=1000 is the same, so far as I'm able to tell. I've no idea whether it might be relevant, but I have option DEVICE_POLLING turned on; toggling sysctl kern.polling.enable doesn't seem to make any difference. The machine is a very uninteresting single-CPU Athlon box, clocked at 1.6GHz, several years old. Here's its dmesg output, with a few uninteresting bits of information leakage elided.
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