The following behavior of the steal counter observed in a Xen guest running 4.9 kernel: $ while sleep 1; do head -1 /proc/stat ; done cpu 1556 0 1429 314195002 5529 0 64 14370419283 0 0 cpu 1556 0 1429 314195402 5529 0 64 3601506907 0 0 cpu 1556 0 1429 314195802 5529 0 64 1833790429262 0 0 cpu 1556 0 1429 314196203 5529 0 64 1821957766874 0 0 cpu 1556 0 1429 314196603 5529 0 64 1810766851628 0 0 cpu 1556 0 1429 314197002 5529 0 64 1792853828090 0 0 Could this patch or some variation of it be included in the 4.9 LTS? https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?att=1;bug=871608;filename=handle-decreasing-steal-clock.patch;msg=5 Problem exists in versions 4.8 until 4.11 so older LTS kernels should not be affected. More details on this problem here: https://0xstubs.org/debugging-a-flaky-cpu-steal-time-counter-on-a-paravirtualized-xen-guest/ -- Valentin