100.0% usage by Audio codec hwC0D0: Realtek

Question

I ran powertop, and it says that the Realtek audio codec is using 100.0% of the cpu. Is this a problem?

I'm running Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit on Intel® Core™ i7 CPU M 640 @ 2.80GHz × 4 Sony VAIO laptop.

It says that it's active 100% of the time, not that it uses 100% of the CPU. ;) I don't see it causing any trouble here. — htorque, Dec 29 '11 at 19:44
you can enable power saving mode on the audio speaker using powertop — Alex Jones, Mar 03 '19 at 09:47

undoIT · Answer 1 · 2012-03-23T11:19:46.427

27

Try changing "Enable Audio codec power management" to good in the Tunables tab for powertop. After doing so, hwC0D0 is no longer listed in powertop for me.

edited Mar 23 '12 at 11:19

answered Mar 23 '12 at 10:57

undoIT

371

It worked for me too (now let's see if power consumption will improve). Anyway there are loads of other settings like this one, I've enabled all of them...cross fingers the system will boot the next time :) – funder7 Aug 10 '20 at 18:02

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 10 '12 at 17:13

9

No, it just means that you have (probably digital) sound output enabled. If you have some sound outputs, such as digital (optical/coaxial) or hdmi you are not using, then you can blacklist their drivers and you might save some battery. They will be listed in lsmod something like, snd_hda_code_realtek and snd_hda_codec_hdmi. By adding these to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf you can disable them.

edited Aug 10 '12 at 17:13

Raja G

102,391
106
255
328

answered Dec 29 '11 at 19:48

daithib8

3,351

2

In case someone finds this question looking for a way to remove the realtek audio from Powertop DO NOT FOLLOW THE ABOVE ANSWER. Blacklisting the drivers will disable all audio from your machine. The only way to fix it is to remove the blacklisting and then doing a hard shutdown with sudo sh -c "echo o > /proc/sysrq-trigger". USE THE ANSWER BELOW THIS ONE – Leonardo Petrucci Sep 23 '18 at 17:48

score 7 · Answer 3 · answered May 25 '12 at 11:50

7

I found that muting the microphone input in the mixer solved the problem. I use a Dell XPS17.

answered May 25 '12 at 11:50

Ian Chard

71

This mean your microphone was constantly listening? – Dan May 03 '18 at 08:24
Looks like it works only one time. The 100% usage disappeared after I muted mic, but when I turned it on for a while, and turned it off again, 100% usage stayed intact. – Astery May 05 '22 at 18:33

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 05 '12 at 07:02

0

Muting / disabling stuff with alsamixer helped me get rid of the same problem on macbook air.

answered Jan 05 '12 at 07:02

Erb

281
2
6

100.0% usage by Audio codec hwC0D0: Realtek

4 Answers4

Linked