Kevin
it looks to me that there's a lock that is not released and that causes this 
problem. it might be that is the clustering you use.
Can you please explain how you started snort?

Please file a bug on bugzilla.ntop.org for tracking this issue

Regards Luca

On Jun 16, 2011, at 6:53 PM, Kevin Branch wrote:

> 
> Ever since upgrading a couple of my CentOS 4.6 NIDS sensor hosts to use the 
> latest PF_RING from subversion, they have been recurrently locking up with 
> CPU soft lockup errors like this, forcing a manual system reboot:
>    BUG: soft lockup - CPU#1 stuck for 61s! [snort:5049]
> 
> On one sensor host, I downgraded to PF_RING 4195 and the problem completely 
> went away.  However on the other host I am needing to take advantage of the 
> snort 2.9 daq and pf_ring clustering, so in that case I replaced the hardware 
> (now a dual-core hyperthreaded Xeon system) and switched to Ubuntu 10.04 
> server in hopes of getting better alignment with current PF_RING development 
> and eliminating this problem -- but it still comes up frequently.  I've also 
> diagnostically downgraded from snort-2.9.0.5 to snort 2.8.6.1 and shut down 
> all other NIDS processes besides snort.
> 
> Currently on my Ubuntu sensor host, I am running 4 instances of snort 2.8.6.1 
> linked against the latest PF_RING.  Each snort instance is sniffing a unique 
> physical network interface (e1000).  I am not using transparent mode or the 
> PF_RING version of the e1000 driver at this point.  When I shut down these 
> snort instances and then attempt to start them up again, at least half the 
> time the NIDS host seizes up with CPU soft lockup errors and has to be 
> rebooted.   I have tried disabling hyperthreading to no avail.    I also 
> started using taskset to set cpu affinity for each snort process such that 
> each instance runs on a unique logical cpu.   I have been able to recreate 
> this problem even when limiting myself to 2 snort processes, as long as they 
> are running on the same physical cpu.
> 
> When I rebuild snort 2.8.6.1 to not use PF_RING, I can restart all 4 snort 
> instances endlessly without CPU soft lockups.
> 
> It seems that I can't reliably restart sets of snort daemons on the same 
> physical CPU if snort is linked against current PF_RING.
> 
> I really don't know where to go from here, so I'm hoping someone else has 
> encountered something like this or can suggest where I should go next in the 
> process of diagnosing the issue.
> 
> Kevin Branch
> _______________________________________________
> Ntop-misc mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://listgateway.unipi.it/mailman/listinfo/ntop-misc

---
If you can not measure it, you can not improve it - Lord Kelvin

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