CentOS - Nov 2005 - kernel load 40-50%?

Is there any command to view what kernel is doing when I have a high
kernel/system load??
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On 11/25/05, Alberto <xagonzalezm at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Is there any command to view what kernel is doing when I have a high
> kernel/system load??

$top

$man top for details
--
Sudev Barar
Learning Linux

On Friday 25 November 2005 02:31, Alberto wrote:
> Is there any command to view what kernel is doing when I have a high
> kernel/system load??
Unfortunately Linux has no real good way to determine that... Unless you got 
bad hardware (got any old qlogic fibre cards in your box by any change) there 
is most likely some process that is issueing a huge number of system calls. 
The other possibility is that some device causes a ton of interrupts. 

The system call stuff is more likely. I would start with top and look for the 
process that has the highest cpu utilization - system calls usually also have 
some from of processing in user mode. Then use strace -p <pid> to check
the
process... Anything up to few pages per process per second is normal and 
generates nowhere the system load you're seeing. Most likely you'll end
up
with a process that spins in a loop and does stuff like stat, accept or read 
over and over again.

Peter.