As you could read in one of my previous posts, I have been investigating my Sagem F@st 3464 modem a little, to see if it ran Linux (which it does). With the help of this topic, I was able to login into the modem with telnet. After entering the password and typing the "shell" command, I was presented an ash shell with BusyBox.

Whenever I login into a new Linux system, I have the habit of executing the uptime command. Doing that, I immediately noticed a load average of 1.00. So I checked with top, if anything was keeping the system busy. And yes, there is a process tr98* using about 100% of the CPU all the time. * TR-098 enables remote configuration of QoS parameters for Telco managed CPEs using an ACS (TR-069 server), and is a standard extension to TR-069 protocol.

Mem: 33160K used, 23148K free, 0K shrd, 212K buff, 14648K cached
Load average: 1.00, 0.94, 0.55    (State: S=sleeping R=running, W=waiting)

  PID USER     STATUS   RSS  PPID %CPU %MEM COMMAND
  746 0        R        672   741 97.0  1.1 tr98
  767 0        R        340   757  1.9  0.6 top
  574 0        S       3948     1  0.7  7.0 openrg
  697 0        S       2168   691  0.0  3.8 vdsld
  676 0        S       2168   673  0.0  3.8 vdsld
  693 0        S       2168   691  0.0  3.8 vdsld
  696 0        S       2168   691  0.0  3.8 vdsld
  699 0        S       2168   691  0.0  3.8 vdsld
  692 0        S       2168   691  0.0  3.8 vdsld
  695 0        S       2168   691  0.0  3.8 vdsld
  698 0        S       2168   691  0.0  3.8 vdsld
  694 0        S       2168   691  0.0  3.8 vdsld
  691 0        S       2168   676  0.0  3.8 vdsld
  749 0        S       1804     1  0.0  3.2 sipd
  754 0        S       1804   750  0.0  3.2 sipd
  756 0        S       1804   750  0.0  3.2 sipd
  753 0        S       1804   750  0.0  3.2 sipd
  751 0        S       1804   750  0.0  3.2 sipd
  755 0        S       1804   750  0.0  3.2 sipd
  750 0        S       1804   749  0.0  3.2 sipd

If you start searching the Internet a little bit, you'll quickly find several posts mentioning the Bbox2 or Sagem 3464 becomes pretty warm rather fast. I've also seen a Bbox2 modem at a customer that started to look a bit brown. I believe this might be caused by that tr98 process. Since I have this process eating CPU on both my Bbox2 and my Sagem, this likely is a common problem with all these modems. Hence, I have contacted Belgacom to look into this issue. Having a process using 100% CPU all the time, certainly wont do performance any good. It also wont increase the lifespan, or decrease your energy bill. Let's hope Belgacom will take this serious. Whenever I hear from them, you'll read it here. Meanwhile, if you're worried about this, I suggest to disconnect the modem's power supply whenever you don't need it.