Any way to find what processes/systems are using softirqd?
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Any way to find what processes/systems are using softirqd?
I have noticed that whenever I run KDE4 I have two ksoftirqd processes (I am assuming one per core) constistantly using 20-40% of my CPU. I have tried disabling certain modules and my guess is that the culprit is the fglrx module, but I have no way to know for sure. Is there a way to check to see what is calling the interrupts?
I could not find a command to identify a process's parent, though I'm sure there is one, but this command will print a process tree. Maybe it will help.
I know that the softirqd is a process that is spawned by the kernel to queue interrupts whenever there is a higher load than the hardware interrupts can handle. So, I don't think that finding the parent will solve the issue but thanks for the suggestion.
P.S. Running ps -Af will show you the parent process (as well as pstree). The parent of softirqd is kthreadd which is not a normal process but is part of the kernel AFAIK.
Bear in mind that "k" in the name of a process can refer either to "KDE"or to "Kernel."
Kernel processes are literally "part of the kernel." They execute as dispatchable processes (under privileged rules of order), executing code in kernel-space, to handle those "kernel" duties that are most agreeably defined as being asynchronous.
Last edited by sundialsvcs; 03-29-2012 at 10:19 AM.
Yeah, I knew that ksoftirqd wasn't part of KDE, it just seemed to happen whenever KDE4 was running. I couldn't figure out how to install LTTng but after testing I think I've pretty conclusively found that it's the fglrx module. I don't want to switch back to the open source drivers. I wonder if there is some option in xorg.conf that will solve the problem.
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