[oe] 'swapper' process using 100% cpu when system idle

[Chris Tapp]

> Well, I can only guess, but you may have a misbehaving application.  I
> experienced something similar on a laptop, and didn't even know it
> until I unplugged and took an airplane ride.  In 2 hours, my 6+ hour
> battery was dead...an HP scanner driver was consuming 99% CPU even
> though the scanner was not even plugged into the laptop!  Bad me for
> trusting, and bad HP for a dumb design (or even dumber bug!)
>
> If you can, try selectively killing applications until the condition
> goes away.  Also, you didn't mention how much memory you're system
> has, you may be overwhelming it.  And by 'swapper' I presume you mean
> kswapd?
>
> Alternatively, start out with as minimal a system as possible, ie just
> start a shell, then mount /proc and see what's going on using ps/top,
> etc. Then manually walk through your system init until you find the
> offender, if it's userspace at all.  Given that you changed kernel
> versions and still have the issue, that points more towards apps.

Thanks - this is a very basic image (basically just console-image) and  
has nothing running. 'swapper' is process '1' and top shows that all  
cpu is used by it as 'system' time - the 'idle' time counter always  
shows 0%.

Chris