I'm wondering if anyone has seen this before, and could perhaps shed some light on a solution.
I'm running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, fully updated in a text-only server configuration, and the kacpid and kacpi_notify processes have started to take up ~70% and ~15% of CPU time, respectively. I've traced the problem to what looks like an insane amount of ACPI interrupts:
[root@centauri ~]# cat /proc/interrupts | grep acpi; sleep 5; cat /proc/interrupts | grep acpi
9: 447753 0 32693472 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi acpi
9: 447753 0 32850749 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi acpi
At over 30k interrupts a second, something is clearly wrong. Additionally, if I check another server with a very similar hardware configuration, the interrupt counts for this particular interrupt is always zero. Both systems are running Core i7 2600K processors with hyper-threading disabled. I've tried resetting all defaults in the BIOS, with no luck.
Any ideas what could cause such a high number of interrupts?
If I boot with acpi=off, this problem goes away. Besides power control, are there any drawbacks to running the system with ACPI disabled?