I believe that the stock
CentOS5 kernel is new enough to work fine with ACPI on Windows VMs, but I am
not certain. I suspect xm info would return a newer version of Xen, and
even if it didn’t, I suspect RedHat would have the appropriate patches to
fix that included in RHEL 5 (CentOS being a clone). That said, since I
really don’t know for sure, you might try disabling ACPI to see if it
makes a difference (you can disable it in the config and the ACPI kernel will
boot without it, you can’t have multiple VCPUs without ACPI, though, so
if you have multiple CPUs, you will have to cut it to one to test this). If
you have the problem with ACPI disabled, you might try booting into Safe Mode
to see if it isn’t something in Windows (you could even try that
first). Aside from that, I don’t know of anything that will cause
that. I think bad drivers, bad hardware (“hardware” in this
case), bad software, and Deferred Procedure Calls all cause an increase in CPU
utilization in Task Manager (even if it is as the “System” process).
Assuming I am wrong about DPCs and they don’t show up in Task Manager,
these articles could prove interesting (though not necessarily very helpful):
http://www.networkworld.com/search/searchresults.html?qt=DPC&hpg1=sb&search=DPC
Starting about halfway
through this one: http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2007/092507-gearhead.html
Dustin
From: Achievement Chan
[mailto:achievement.hk@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2008 11:18
To: Dustin.Henning@xxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] windows xp/xen cpu utilization
I'm using Centos5 x86_64 with update by YUM
CentOS5 kernel 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen
Xen 3.0.3 release 64.el5_2.1
I've tried to restart xend the windowsxp guest domain. The cpu loading still
very high...
2008/9/2 Dustin Henning <Dustin.Henning@xxxxxxxxxxx>
I
believe this can be caused by Windows ACPI calls, but only on really old
versions of Xen. What versions and distributions are you running?
I also found high cpu loading of my windows xp domain too.
It showed 100% cpu loading on `xm top`.
However, I've checked the loading in Task Manage of WindowsXP. It is normal.
Have you find the anwser about this problem already?
