System Load and Preemption

Aurora · l33t Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 658 Location: Classified

I have something really weird going on, and I would like to share with the community to get some feedback as to why this is happening.

I have a single-core Xenon system (with HyperThreading) running at 3.06ghz. I posted in the "Other Things Gentoo" forum about this earlier but have not yet recieved a response.

If I turn kernel preemption on, the system load remains at a constant 1.00 (roughly), although the system is not doing anything. In fact, there is not a single process that is using the processor, but the load stays steadily at 1.00. I played with the kernel and finally figured out that the fact that kernel preemption was turned out, the system was acting the way it was...

Is this normal? I have been running Gentoo on multiple different systems, many of which are servers, and some of them have kernel preemption on (which seems to be a default option?). However, I never remember this "constant load" problem.

Can someone shed some light on this situation?

Thanks!
_________________
"My downfall raises me to infinite heights." -Napoleon Bonaparte

loki99 · Posted: Sat Feb 11, 2006 8:22 am Post subject:

AFAIK, for preemptive multitasking you need to setup a scheduler who manages cpu time. And isn't it mainly used for audio editing and stuff?

Aurora · l33t Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 658 Location: Classified