AC88U with Core 2 locked at 100%

[kck]

Happened to log into my router (384.10.2) this morning and noticed that core 2 was locked at 100%. Things seemed to be working ok but it was clear that wasn't a normal condition (no variance at all from 100% use).

Top showed no particular processes hogging the system but did show a load average above 7 (whereas my normal idle case is well below 1). ps | grep D showed a cp of the log files to jffs sitting doing nothing (actually it showed 2 such processes). I found web search references to this being a possible problem indicator so I tried to kill them. Neither would die - even sent a -9.

Tried to reboot from the web gui and the local web image showed the percentage count up as though a reboot was underway. However, when I was able to refresh the page into the router the core was still at 100%. A bit suspicious I took another look at the "reboot" from ssh and in fact the router had not rebooted at all but was still stuck where it was.

So I tried a reboot from ssh - command returned but no reboot. Tried by killing process 1 - again nothing. Router just continued running as it was. Finally I went to the router and did a physical power cycle after which it booted and has been normal since.

Has anyone seen this happen and if so is there any way to actually cause a reboot from the software side. I am away from this router (by 1000 miles) for long parts of the year and would not then be able to do a physical reboot. Although things were running ok with the apparent high load on the one cpu I'm not sure how long that would have continued.

Thanks.

 

[L&LD]

Some have reported that the AiProtection was the core issue for them and 100% CPU.

 

[kck]

Some have reported that the AiProtection was the core issue for them and 100% CPU.

I had AiProtection not enabled on the router so doesn't seem that would be the cause here but thanks.

 

[L&LD]

I had AiProtection not enabled on the router so doesn't seem that would be the cause here but thanks.

Could you try to edit your first post and make it less like a wall of text? Some paragraph-like structure would make it easier to read.

 

[L&LD]

I had AiProtection not enabled on the router so doesn't seem that would be the cause here but thanks.

What other features or custom scripts do you have installed and/or running?

When was the last time you performed a full reset to factory defaults followed by a minimal and manual configuration to secure the router and connect to your ISP?

 

[kck]

It's a pretty simple situation - no scripts to speak of. The main item running is a permanent VPN connection to my other house. That is accomplished by a standard OpenVPN client on this router. There is also a VPN server running on it (though idle) to allow an alternative way in if I screw up the other end of my normal VPN. No local USB attachment and only a single ethernet connection on it - rest of the clients are all wireless.

At the time I did the hard restart the unit had been running for something over 25 days which is from when I did an upgrade of the firmware version to the current one. That was the last time it was reconfigured. It has been absolutely reliable (and was previously when it was on the .8 firmware). Looks to me like some sort of hardware glitch can happen that freezes the nvram file system which resulted in this hang.