Mint Mate - 1 process eating cpu

[jb68]

Did the install from stick on a Dell Latitude E5570. Everything works but I have 1 process stuck . `top - 08:59:25 up 15 min, 1 user, load average: 1.35, 1.36, 1.02 Tasks: 187 total, 3 running, 183 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie %Cpu(s): 0.2 us, 24.5 sy, 0.0 ni, 73.9 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 1.4 si, 0.0 st MiB Mem : 3818.5 total, 1790.6 free, 889.0 used, 1138.8 buff/cache MiB Swap: 2048.0 total, 2048.0 free, 0.0 used. 2556.4 avail Mem

PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                  
 31 root      20   0       0      0      0 R  86.4   0.0  13:23.56 kworker/3:0+pm                                                           
 30 root      20   0       0      0      0 R  13.3   0.0   2:13.17 ksoftirqd/3                                                              
873 root      20   0 1038284 122680  96520 S   1.0   3.1   0:14.93 Xorg                                                                     

1442 jb 20 0 314160 39620 28708 S 0.3 1.0 0:02.69 marco
1481 jb 20 0 340176 25220 19652 S 0.3 0.6 0:01.24 mate-multiload-
1823 jb 20 0 739064 43852 34292 S 0.3 1.1 0:01.89 mate-terminal `

[Harry-W-Haines-III]

Can you open up the system monitor and see if CPU1 is locked at 89-90% CPU usage? If so, that might be a rare kernel issue, usually related with devices on the USB bus. Are you running any external drives, devices on USB? Here is a simple test to confirm it. Do a software reset and see if it is still hung. If CPU1 still hangs, power off and back on. If it goes away after a power cycle its the kernel/BIOS issue. There might be a boot time kernel parameter to work around this.

[frozenMustelid]

Check kern.log and syslog, both under /var/log. Is one or both being spammed with the same error messages? Is it an ACPI error message?

[Harry-W-Haines-III]

FYI on this, I had the same issue on Cinnamon and KDE. The solution for me was not to leave 2 devices connected full time to the USB 3.1 connections with an nVME drive. After I left just one device connected all the time (USB SSD) on USB 3.1, the issue never returned. I moved the other USB device (Software Defined Radio) over to a USB 2 port. It always seemed to happen when I was away from the computer and would come back in the morning and find the CPU temp running high.

Of course your issue might be different. Just a simple search on https://www.google.com/search?q=cpu1+hangs+at+90%25+in+linux reveals that this is more common than people think but hard to root cause. I spent many hours chasing the issue. CPU1 is known as the 'monarch' processor so suspected the issue was a lot of traffic got generated on the USB 3.1 bus and instead of handing the load off to another processor, it got stuck 'watch-dogging' the activity.

[jb68]

Yes, cpu 1 (or zero depending how you cont ) is the one. Software reset is sudo reboot ? If yes didn't do anything. I don't have any USB devices aside the ones built in Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 8087:0a2b Intel Corp. Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0a5c:5832 Broadcom Corp. 5880 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Checked logs, no spams, nothing on ker.log sys or journalctl -f

However this is a salvage laptop and 1 usb is broken ( reporting overcurrent ) but older version of mint worked ok. When I say older I tried with an 2014 Mint disk updated to current. Then I decided to try the beta. I may try with a new current version.

[Harry-W-Haines-III]

This issue goes away, if you power cycle the laptop? And then starts up again after a while?