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I'm experiencing the "kworker hogging 100% of my CPU" issue. It cropped up a few months ago, and I did something, probably found right here, and fixed it. I wish I could remember what it was. Anyway, I rebooted my laptop last night, and the problem recurred. Top shows that for about 40 seconds of every minute, kworker pushes my processor to 100%, and everything just stops, the mouse pointer vanishes, the keystrokes go into a buffer, and appear when the processor is freed. I'm working through the suggestions in this post and the author states that they ran:

grep . -r /sys/firmware/acpi/interrupts/

And that yielded the information that one of their interrupts had a value of 200k, so that was clearly their problem. When I run it, my results show that the highest value any of my interrupts are set to is 19. I have not much of an idea what any of this means, but 19 doesn't seem very high when the other guy saw 200k. I'm not sure where to go from here.

Since someone will probably ask, I'm running a ROG Strix G17, and :

cat /etc/os-release

PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION_ID="22.04"
VERSION="22.04.1 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)"
VERSION_CODENAME=jammy
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian

Thanks in advance for any help that can be offered.

Charlie Bravo

richbl
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CharlieBravo
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  • can you tame it with "sudo renice -n 20 $(pidof kworker)" – pierrely Feb 18 '23 at 06:14
  • I got this as a reply, which may mean it's working: 
    (hostname)~$ 180 (process ID) old priority 0, new priority 19

    After running top, I am seeing lines like this, with percentages as high as 65% PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
    6180 root 20 0 0 0 0 I 16.9 0.0 384:00.25 kworker/3:2-events

     – CharlieBravo Feb 18 '23 at 18:12
  • renice does not guarantee low cpu usage, just nicer to other processes that might be hogged. a few here you can look up https://askubuntu.com/search?q=title%3Akworker – pierrely Feb 19 '23 at 03:57
  • https://serverfault.com/questions/659164/kworker-consuming-90-io-and-zero-disk-write/785415#785415 – pierrely Feb 19 '23 at 03:58
  • sudo lsof | grep kworker

    to see if writing to a drive and which files?

     – pierrely Feb 19 '23 at 03:59

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