[Pogoplug E02] kworker process?

[nnslick]

Hi All,

I recently installed alarm on my Pogoplug E02 and everything is fine except one thing that bothers me: there is one process named kworker that is running all the time and consumes CPU cycles! I tested both Debian and alarm with kernel 3.x.x installations and the behavior is the same. I do not observe this on my Dockstar running alarm or Debian!

Anyone has the same experience? I suspect something related to hardware of my unit, but am curious to find out what causes the process to run all the time.

Any pointers and information will be greatly appreciated!

Cheers!

[moonman]

A little googling gave this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1630347

[nnslick]

Thanks a lot moonman! I did google but did not find good and relevant information as you did!

So I guess some sort of interrupt is happening in my Pogo that are handled by one of these kworker processes. I will dig further to see what is going on.

By the way, my Pogo E02 has the latest uBoot loader from Jeff Doozan's website and I set the arcNumber to the correct value for Pogoplug E02, but after the system is up the front LED is solid orange, not green. Is this normal or do I need to do something else?

Thanks again! Appreciate your help.

[moonman]

I observed the same behavior. Just upgraded U-Boot to the latest and I see orange instead of green. I haven't really looked into it, but i actually like it better because I know if it's orange then I'm in archlinuxarm, if its green then it booted into pogoplug os.

[nnslick]

After a bit of digging, it looks like on my Pogo interrupts that are handled by mvsdio occurs often and consumes CPU cycles! I read the source at http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/dr ... t/mvsdio.c and the comment says this is the device driver for MMC/SD/SDIO! I am just curious as what this driver has to do on my Pogo E02? If it is not needed perhaps I will recompile the kernel to exclude it.

[moonman]

If you want to recompile I've included the modified .config and PKGBUILD. Create a folder on some drive with >=2GB of free space, put the archive there, extract it and run "makepkg --asroot".

Keep in mind I removed support for MMC/SD/SDIO and support for other than Pogoplug E02 devices in this config so make sure you have arcNumber set properly

[nnslick]

Thanks a lot, moonman! Your help encourages me to setup the environment to compile the kernel.

Do you use your Pogo for compiling or do you cross-compile? I am thinking about cross-compiling with my system running on an i5 processor.

Thanks again!

[moonman]

I use distcc environment as described in the development section of the main website. That's what developers use to build packages.

[moonman]

Seems like kernel 3.1.10-12 has been released so I'll have to update this when I get home

[moonman]

I don't think kworker has anything to do with SD/MMC, but I recompiled the kernel without the MMC/SD support just out of curiosity. So far kworker is not consuming that 1.5% of cpu which may change after some uptime.
Beweare! This kernel only works with new U-Boot. If you don't know what you have - don't install.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'cd ~
wget http://music4dance.mine.nu/Downloads/ArchLinuxArm/linux-kirkwood-3.5.2-1-arm.pkg.tar.xz
wget http://music4dance.mine.nu/Downloads/ArchLinuxArm/linux-headers-kirkwood-3.5.2-1-arm.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U ./linux-kirkwood-3.5.2-1-arm.pkg.tar.xz
pacman -U ./linux-headers-kirkwood-3.5.2-1-arm.pkg.tar.xz')

EDIT: Confirmed, it has nothing to do with SD/MMC, here's what it is https://raw.github.com/torvalds/linux/m ... kqueue.txt