Re: top displaying 50% si time and 50% idle on idle machine

["Metathronius Galabant" <m.galabant@googlemail.com>]

> >>>>Cpu(s):  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 50.0% id,  0.0%
> >>>>wa,  0.0% hi, 50.0%si
>
> >> BTW what means si? (interrupt service time? google
> >> didn't find anything)
>
> > 'soft interrupt' probably. try disconnecting network.
>
> The cause has been found. The timer of that machine is seriously
> broken, 1 second is approximately 500ms long.
> It is a HP DL360 G4 and I configured the kernel without ACPI or
> similar. Maybe there are some strange BIOS power management schemes
> active. I will look deeper into the problem and report back.
> A broken timer is _very_ strange to me (I didn't encounter that in the
> last 12 years w/ custom kernels).

Power management was completely switched off, so that was not the cause.
Instead, please have a look the this dmesg outputs:

not working (no ACPI):

ENABLING IO-APIC IRQs
unknown bus type 32. (repeated MULTIPLE TIMES!)
..TIMER: vector=0x31 apic1=-1 pin1=-1 apic2=-1 pin2=-1
...trying to set up timer (IRQ0) through the 8259A ...  failed.
...trying to set up timer as Virtual Wire IRQ... works.


working (ACPI + processor support):

ENABLING IO-APIC IRQs
..TIMER: vector=0x31 apic1=0 pin1=2 apic2=-1 pin2=-1

Can this be considered as a kernel-bug?

Thanks for the help,
M.