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[Bug 1435587] [NEW] System slows down to almost unusable then freezes during usage (High kworker cpu usage etc)

 

Public bug reported:

Hi, after an update about a month and a half / two months ago my system
started freezing after a period of usage. This tends to happen about
once a day... so generally after the laptop's been on for a few hours
(not necessarily constantly), sometimes probably up to 8 or ten hours.
But the freezing doesn't seem to correlate to any particular activity or
application that I am using.

When the freeze occurs, the system slows down and doing anything takes
excruciatingly long. It never recovers from this and I have to shutdown.
Sometime REISUB can take the system down but sometimes I just have to
hold the power button to switch it off the harmful way! A few times I
have managed to get 'System Activity' (KDE Task Manager) or top up
before it has frozen completely and this has shown multiple Kworker
processes using up huge amounts of CPU.

Looking this up on the forums I found a couple of suggested solutions: I
tried turning off acpi interrupts for certain gpes
(http://askubuntu.com/questions/176565/why-does-kworker-cpu-usage-get-
so-high). I initially thought this had helped, but it hasn't (possibly
slowing down the frequency of the freezes). I also tried the drm_kms
helper fix: https://souriguha.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/how-to-solve-
problem-with-thinkpadkslowd-kworker-on-linux-kernel-2-35-2-36/. Alas, no
success.

As I said, the freezing first occured almost two months ago, whilst I
was using Ubuntu 14.04. I upgrade to 14.10 to see if this would help the
freeze but no luck.

Happy to try further diagnostics or any suggested workarounds
appreciated; I got a bit lost in the different wiki pages and wasn't
sure whether this was really the same sort of freeze / crash as they
were talking about (I don't think it really has anything to do with
xorg!)

Cheers.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.10
Package: xorg 1:7.7+7ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.16.0-31.43-generic 3.16.7-ckt5
Uname: Linux 3.16.0-31-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.7-0ubuntu8.2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Mon Mar 23 21:53:17 2015
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-05-02 (325 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140416.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: xorg
Symptom: display
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to utopic on 2015-02-17 (34 days ago)

** Affects: xorg (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New


** Tags: amd64 apport-bug fonts kubuntu utopic

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop
Packages, which is subscribed to xorg in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1435587

Title:
  System slows down to almost unusable then freezes during usage (High
  kworker cpu usage etc)

Status in xorg package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Hi, after an update about a month and a half / two months ago my
  system started freezing after a period of usage. This tends to happen
  about once a day... so generally after the laptop's been on for a few
  hours (not necessarily constantly), sometimes probably up to 8 or ten
  hours. But the freezing doesn't seem to correlate to any particular
  activity or application that I am using.

  When the freeze occurs, the system slows down and doing anything takes
  excruciatingly long. It never recovers from this and I have to
  shutdown. Sometime REISUB can take the system down but sometimes I
  just have to hold the power button to switch it off the harmful way! A
  few times I have managed to get 'System Activity' (KDE Task Manager)
  or top up before it has frozen completely and this has shown multiple
  Kworker processes using up huge amounts of CPU.

  Looking this up on the forums I found a couple of suggested solutions:
  I tried turning off acpi interrupts for certain gpes
  (http://askubuntu.com/questions/176565/why-does-kworker-cpu-usage-get-
  so-high). I initially thought this had helped, but it hasn't (possibly
  slowing down the frequency of the freezes). I also tried the drm_kms
  helper fix: https://souriguha.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/how-to-solve-
  problem-with-thinkpadkslowd-kworker-on-linux-kernel-2-35-2-36/. Alas,
  no success.

  As I said, the freezing first occured almost two months ago, whilst I
  was using Ubuntu 14.04. I upgrade to 14.10 to see if this would help
  the freeze but no luck.

  Happy to try further diagnostics or any suggested workarounds
  appreciated; I got a bit lost in the different wiki pages and wasn't
  sure whether this was really the same sort of freeze / crash as they
  were talking about (I don't think it really has anything to do with
  xorg!)

  Cheers.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.10
  Package: xorg 1:7.7+7ubuntu2
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.16.0-31.43-generic 3.16.7-ckt5
  Uname: Linux 3.16.0-31-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.14.7-0ubuntu8.2
  Architecture: amd64
  CurrentDesktop: KDE
  Date: Mon Mar 23 21:53:17 2015
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-05-02 (325 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140416.1)
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
   LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: xorg
  Symptom: display
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to utopic on 2015-02-17 (34 days ago)

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Follow ups

References