On Mon, 25 Jul 2016, Christoph Lameter wrote: > Guess so. I will have a look at this when I get some time again. Ok so the problem is the clocksource_watchdog() function in kernel/time/clocksource.c. This function is active if CONFIG_CLOCKSOURCE_WATCHDOG is defined. It will check the timesources of each processor for being within bounds and then reschedule itself on the next one. The purpose of the function seems to be to determine *if* a clocksource is unstable. It does not mean that the clocksource *is* unstable. The critical piece of code is this: /* * Cycle through CPUs to check if the CPUs stay synchronized * to each other. */ next_cpu = cpumask_next(raw_smp_processor_id(), cpu_online_mask); if (next_cpu >= nr_cpu_ids) next_cpu = cpumask_first(cpu_online_mask); watchdog_timer.expires += WATCHDOG_INTERVAL; add_timer_on(&watchdog_timer, next_cpu); Should we just cycle through the cpus that are not isolated? Otherwise we need to have some means to check the clocksources for accuracy remotely (probably impossible for TSC etc). The WATCHDOG_INTERVAL is 1 second so this causes an interrupt every second. Note that we are running with the patch that removes the 1 HZ mininum time tick. With an older kernel code base (redhat) we can keep the kernel quiet for minutes. The clocksource watchdog causes timers to fire again. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html