Intermittent hangs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 vmware guest with irqpoll enabled
Issue
Intermittent hangs on RHEL5 servers running under VMware with the irqpoll kernel option enabled. Problem spans multiple ESX, RHEL and network configurations. Symptoms of the hangs can vary:
- Keyboard / mouse usually do not respond, but sometimes give partial response (e.g. to SysRq)
- Occasionally keyboard / mouse still respond, but may programs do not make forward progress
- System sometimes responds to ping or other network services, sometimes does not
Environment
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8
irqpolloption enabled on kernel command line- VMware guest (this may not be a necessary condition, but the problem has only been observed so far on VMware guests)
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