Issue

• VMware virtual machine guest suffers multiple soft lockups at the same time
• We are experiencing kernel panic due to softlockup.
• vmcore shows hung tasks like:

BUG: soft lockup - CPU#6 stuck for 73s! [flush-253:0:1207]
BUG: soft lockup - CPU#7 stuck for 74s! [processname:15706]
BUG: soft lockup - CPU#5 stuck for 63s! [processname:25582]
BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 64s! [proceessname:15789]

but the vmcore itself shows these processes in running state for much less than these softlockup times:

crash> ps -m 1207 15706 25582 15789 
[0 00:00:12.231] [RU]  PID: 15789  TASK: ffff8806347e5520  CPU: 0   COMMAND: "processname"
[0 00:00:42.875] [RU]  PID: 25582  TASK: ffff8806323cb520  CPU: 5   COMMAND: "processname"
[0 00:00:42.457] [RU]  PID: 15706  TASK: ffff880634f00040  CPU: 7   COMMAND: "processname"
[0 00:00:18.050] [RU]  PID: 1207   TASK: ffff8806309bf520  CPU: 6   COMMAND: "flush-253:0"

The following line may or may not be present:

hrtimer: interrupt took NUMBER ns