[Bug 316187] [NEW] kernel 2.6.24 "Soft lockup" under load on VMWare ESX 3.5

[Etienne Goyer]

Public bug reported:

Under load, hardy kernel 2.6.24-23.46-server experience seemingly random
soft lockups when run as a VM guest on VMWare ESX 3.5 update 2.  The
problem appears when multiple guest are put under load; I was stress-
testing six guest, and two got the soft lockup problem described.  The
problem manifest itself seemingly at random.

The hypervisor is run on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with 4 GB of RAM and two
L5320 Xeon CPU.

The hardy guests are amd64.  They are being put under load using the
"stress" utility from the universe repository.  The command line used to
start the stress utility is:

    stress --cpu 8 --io 8 --vm 3 --vm-bytes 128M --hdd 2


The machine remain responsive after the soft lockup, and it is possible to kill the currently running stress processes by doing Ctrl-C and getting the shell back.  Attached is the output of dmesg on the two VM (out of six) that had the problem, suffixed with -1 and -2 respectively.

** Affects: linux-meta (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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kernel 2.6.24 "Soft lockup" under load on VMWare ESX 3.5
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/316187
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