Dell Vostro 200: Interrupts
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I sincerely apologize if this has been covered elsewhere.
I've got a Dell Vostro 200 that I'm planning on using for pfSense. Everything seems to be working smoothly. My only concern is that the system is continually running at a load average of 1, even with no load on it. Looking at top, I see that the CPU is busy dealing with interrupts.
last pid: 67336; load averages: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00 up 0+13:42:24 03:46:33 80 processes: 4 running, 59 sleeping, 17 waiting CPU states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 0.2% system, 41.7% interrupt, 58.1% idle(This is a dual-core processor, so it appears that one of the cores is busy handling interrupts.)
If I look at vmstat -i, I see:
interrupt total rate irq16: skc0 uhci0 2371 0 irq18: ehci0 uhci5 2 0 irq19: uhci2 uhci* 2585067329 52370 irq21: uhci1 1 0 cpu0: timer 98676946 1999 cpu1: timer 98676389 1999 Total 2782423038 56368I'm really not sure how to go about debugging this problem. Any advice would be appreciated.
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An update…
The BIOS in this system has a setting that controls the SATA controller's mode... It can be toggled between "IDE" and "RAID". By default the system was configured in "IDE" mode--the controller showed up as a generic ATA controller under FreeBSD.
Tonight I switched the controller to "RAID" mode. Now it shows up as an Intel ICH8 SATA300 controller. The high interrupts have disappeared and everything seems to be working well.
The only catch is that the system doesn't appear to detect the SATA DVD-ROM any longer. This isn't a show-stopper as I'm only using it during the initial installation. I can probably toggle the controller configuration for that purpose.
Maybe the DVD-ROM will reappear in the future with a 7.x FreeBSD kernel?
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I think the Dell systems which allow RAID see Sata0 and Sata1 as members of RAID. If you have another Sata port ie…Sata2 try switching the CD-ROM to that port. I know this is true with the Dell 755's.
Mark