Interrupt storm detected on "irq 20" throttling interrupt source

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

I receive the following warning messages on a very new machine which has FreeBSD 8.1 x64 installed on it:

Interrupt storm detected on "irq 20" throttling interrupt source

It is unclear what this means and what its origins are (motherboard? CPU? RAM?).
I can start the desktop and the message is then no longer visible, but the question is whether this warning message is still being generated in the background.

2

I have seen this happen with FreeBSD on top of VMWARE. Are you running BSD standalone?

3

Yes, this is FreeBSD and is standalone. This is the first time the computer is restarted after an install a week earlier, so likely to happen again after every restart.

4

Check the system logs to see if the message is showing up there, perhaps dmesg or /var/log/messages

5

Thank you all for making suggestions. I had to restart the computer as a result of a refurbishing of the room the machine is in and the issue did not reoccur. The /var/log/messages file has about 20 occurrences of the warning line, but the cause remains unclear. I am considering this solved.