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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

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  • @wiking I have. I had this CPU issue with it installed, and before i installed it. I also tried putting the load of the GPU tasks solely over to the GPU and vice versa. Had no impact to my problem as i could notice
    – denNorske
    Jul 13, 2018 at 12:33
  • Added the extra information @Wiking
    – denNorske
    Jul 13, 2018 at 12:40
  • I can confirm it was kworker, however none of the available solutions worked for my part. I ended up installing 16.04 and a custom kernal with it.
    – denNorske
    Jul 16, 2018 at 14:10
  • I have a similar problem, any solution or workaround? Oct 4, 2018 at 21:49
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    I was able to keep the Surface Book 2 heat under control on Ubuntu 20 after switching to this kernel: github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface. I had tried the jakeday kernel but it didn't seem to fix my overheating problem.
    – mikebridge
    May 18, 2020 at 22:23

1 Answer 1

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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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