Comment by rsanders

Removing CPU limits seems like a bad idea now that there's a kernel fix. But putting that aside...

I don't understand why pods without CPU limits would cause unresponsive kubelets. For a long time now Kubernetes has allocated a slice for system services. While pods without CPU limits are allowed to burst, they are still limited to the amount of CPU allocated to kubernetes pods.

Run "systemd-cgls" on a node and you'll see two toplevel slices: kubepods and system. The kubelet process lives within the system slice.

If you run "kubectl describe <node>" you can see the resources set aside for system processes on the node. Processes in the system slice should always have (cpu_capacity - cpu_allocatable) available to share, no matter what happens in the kubepods slice.

    Capacity:
        cpu:                         8
        ephemeral-storage:           83873772Ki
        memory:                      62907108Ki
    Allocatable:
        cpu:                         7910m
        ephemeral-storage:           76224326324
        memory:                      61890276Ki
        pods:                        58

Granted, it's not a large proportion of CPU.