to do scheduler tracing, first pick up the sched-devel git tree: http://people.redhat.com/mingo/sched-devel.git/README which also includes a scheduler tracer. Enable CONFIG_CONTEXT_SWITCH_TRACER=y and CONFIG_FRAME_POINTERS=y in your .config, rebuild the kernel, boot into the new kernel and mount debugfs: mkdir /debug mount -t debugfs nodev /debug and read /debug/tracing/README. The following will capture a 1 second trace of whatever happens on your box right now: cd /debug/tracing/ echo sched_switch > current_tracer echo 1 > tracing_enabled sleep 1 echo 0 > tracing_enabled cat trace > /tmp/trace.txt /tmp/trace.txt will contain the trace. Send that to kernel developers :) some extra nice trace with function backtraces can be gotten if you do: echo stacktrace > /debug/tracing/iter_ctrl