Re: thousands of kworker processes with 4.7.x and 4.8-rc*

From: Mike Galbraith
Date: Sun Sep 25 2016 - 13:21:53 EST


On Sun, 2016-09-25 at 21:40 +0900, Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:

> The problem is the allocator.
>
> -CONFIG_SLUB=y
> +CONFIG_SLAB=y
>
>
> With SLUB, I'm getting a handful of kworker processes, as expected.
>
> With SLAB, I'm getting thousands of kworker processes.
>
>
> Not sure if that's expected behaviour or not.

I seriously doubt 1500+ kworkers piling up is expected.

4.7.0-rc4 47
4.7.0-rc5 1592

Presuming you didn't switch to SLAB and/or change userspace all around
while testing, that would still indicate a kernel regression lurking
between rc4 and rc5.

-Mike