I'm having a strange problem on my Q6600 that cropped up starting with the 2.6.29 series of the kernel, and is still present in 2.6.30.
Essentially, at all times, I have four nice 19 processes running, which for the sake of this post, we'll call "dnetc". All four cores are utilized. At this point, if I start another CPU-bound process that isn't niced, it begins to take up an entire core. This is expected. What isn't expected, however, is that another core begins idling inexplicably. As a result, despite 5 processes currently available to run, only 3 are actually running at any given time (the non-niced process, and two instances of dnetc). I have no idea where to begin diagnosing this, so if anyone has any pointers or knows anything, I'd like to hear about it. I've done numerous searches of mailing lists, bug trackers, etc., but haven't found anything. Maybe I just can't find the right keywords.
