> Source: [sk183944](https://support.checkpoint.com/results/sk/sk183944)

# sk183944 - Security Group freezes repeatedly and shows errors "NMI watchdog: BUG: soft lockup"

| Property | Value |
|----------|-------|
| Solution ID | sk183944 |
| Date Created | 2025-09-11 |
| Last Modified | 2025-09-15 |
| Technical Level | Advanced |
| Products | Scalable Platforms |
| Versions | R82.10, R82, R81.20, R81.10 (EOS) |
| OS | Gaia |

## Symptoms

- * The Security Group freezes and becomes unresponsive, requiring hard reboots.

  In some cases, devices do not recover after power cycling.
* CPU Spike Detective ([sk166454](https://support.checkpoint.com/results/sk/sk166454)) shows "`hwclock`" as the top CPU consumer.

* The "`dmesg`" command and the `/var/log/messages` file repeatedly show "`NMI watchdog: BUG: soft lockup`".

## Cause

In the reported case, the Indeni monitoring client repeatedly executed the "`asg_ntp_update_time`" command on the Security Group Members. This command, in turn, repeatedly executed the `/usr/sbin/hwclock` command.

When multiple instances of the `/usr/sbin/hwclock` command run in parallel, it leads to a kernel-level deadlock. This results in soft lockup errors and, in many cases, complete system freezes.

## Solution

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