I am running Fedora Core 4 on a Dell PowerEdge 1750. Recently, I have noticed (from running the top command) that the udevd process is consuming a lot of CPU - approximately 30%. I have never seen this process taking so much of CPU before.

- Kernel version: 2.6.11
- udev version: 058-1

- What could be causing this?
- Is this an hardware issue?
- How do I resolve it?

Thanks for your time.

svangati.

As far as I remember it is a bit old udev for rather fresh kernel.. I had some old udev that made the box boot 3 minutes (2.5 minutes doing udev). Try upgrading both (or at least udev) and post if the results aren't good.

Thanks for the response. I updated the udev package to version 071-0.FC4.3. Right after the upgrade, I ran 'top' and saw that
udevd was consuming less between 0.3% - 0.7% of the CPU - much less than the 30% prior to the upgrade. But over the course of the day, it started taking up more percentage. Right now, I see that the range is between 8% - 12%. I have a sinking feeling that this is going to grow...

Also, on the other systems that I have, I see (from running top) that udev is constantly at 0.0%. Does this indicate any hardware related issues on the box that udev is trying to take up CPU resources? If so, what hardware would that be?

Thanks for your help.

Any further info on this? I've just started seeing the same thing over the past 2 weeks. udev consumes much less than 1% CPU after a reboot. Within a day it's consuming over 10%. After two days everything is so unresponsive I have to reboot.

I'm on udev 071-0.FC4.3 and kernel 2.6.17.1.

I don't see that yum has updated udev in a long time. I can't imagine what changed (I upgraded the kernel is response to this problem). My next bet is to try FC5.

Davek

Davek,

Installing the newer version of udev did not help. I finally took the plunge and rebooted the server (it was a production box). Since then, I have not seen udev chewing up CPU. Not sure why and how the reboot helped. Sorry. Couldn't be of much help.

Sudheer.