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denNorske
Asked: 2018-07-14 02:53:52 +0800 CST

Surface Book 2 - CPU1 always at 89-91% usage (hot) [18.04]

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I've been trying to find people with similar issues as me, and no luck. I just installed Ubuntu 18.04 on my newly bought Microsoft Surface Book 2 - and it's a very handy and portable machine. I know it's not "intended" to use linux on such devices, but I am a linux fan so why not.

As of a fresh install, I could notice my computer got really hot - and it stayed hot. It turns one of my CPU threads are maxed out all the time. Why is ubuntu doing this? I can't find any processes using any CPU at all when idling.

"htop" shows no significant usage on any of the processes there either, and sensor values reads around 80-98 degrees on the package constantly. So I swithced over to Windows for now.

Picture shows that thread 1 is constantly on 90%

Extra information: Extra output

cpu overheating

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I just have the exact same issue as you. I install Arch Linux on my Surface Book 2, and kworker/acpi_notify always eat a CPU core.

    In your ps -eo pid,comm,%cpu output, kworker also consumes high CPU.

    Workaround:

    add acpi=off to the kernel parameters. But this may be not acceptable since all acpi functionalities are lost.

    Solution:

    The issue is the ACPI notify module, use this patched kernel to fix the issue:

    https://github.com/jakeday/linux-surface/

    For Ubuntu, you can just use the pre-built kernel directly.

    If you want to compile from source on a non-ubuntu system, try this guide or the above Github repo.

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