Comment 47 for bug 53216

I suspect Skype is running away (or more likely spin waiting in a tight loop calling gettimeofday). If a process is SCHED_FIFO 99, then it will block all other processes from running until it yields. It may be possible that it could also tickle the soft-lockup detection code. I'm guessing skype runs suid (in order to set itself SCHED_FIFO 99)? What happens if you remove its suid bit and force it to run as a regular user?